Football’s footprint: waste at the World Cup

It’s possible that you’ve heard that there’s a bit of a football tournament taking place in Brazil. The hosts kicked off proceedings with a 3-1 win against Croatia last night. Any major sports event that brings tens of thousands of people from around the world together to watch a highly charged event in hot temperatures means the consumption of a large amount of pre-packaged food and drink. By now the soft drink cans and fast food wrappers (no alcohol allowed inside the stadium!) will have been swept up from São Paolo’s Corinthians stadium: but how much will be recycled?

Green goals

It’s hard to give credit to an organisation seemingly mired in corruption scandal, but some is due to FIFA’s for its environmental efforts. As well as keeping the size of its carbon football boot to a minimum by ensuring that its emissions are offset, it has made waste a prominent part of the planning for its showpiece event. It was considered in the development of the sustainability strategy for the championship, in which the environment featured as one of the major objectives to be tackled:

“FIFA and the LOC shall work to reduce the negative environmental impact of preparing and staging the FWC, focusing on waste, water, energy, transportation, procurement and climate change and use the event to raise awareness about the environment.”

In practice, this has meant the adoption of a two bin system within stadia, to separate dry recyclables from other waste, supported by signage and a team of fifteen volunteers per stadium, all aiming to persuade fans to dispose of their waste responsibly.

Whilst clearly better than nothing, this approach does seem a bit like the waste management equivalent of the 4-4-2 formation: it’s tried and tested, but the world has moved on and it’s unlikely to prove to be a championship-winning formula. There’s no discussion in any of the documents I’ve found of measures to prevent or reduce waste – rather less progressive than the event’s approach to CO2 emissions, which sees a commitment to carbon offsetting backed up by efforts to achieve LEED status for many stadia and reduce energy requirements through the use of solar panels and the introduction of efficient lighting and temperature control systems.

Will Brazil be able to hit its green targets? Photo by Agência Brasil, via Wikimedia Commons.

So there has been no discussion of the potential to ensure that packaging used in stadia is recyclable, let alone consideration of how waste could be prevented by employing reusables. Where better than at the World Cup (which has needed only two cups in the course of 84 years) to promote reusable drinking vessels, found to environmentally outperform single use containers?

Playing by the rules

Hosting the World Cup in countries whose waste infrastructure is still in its infancy adds to the challenge of making recycling work. This was clearly a problem for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. According to a UNEP report, while plans were laid to encourage recycling and reduce waste, “not all host cities and stadiums were able to enforce proper segregation of waste, and did not all have contracts with waste management firms who would recycle, rather than landfill, the waste collected. A number of private entrepreneurs and scavengers often made use of the recyclables themselves.”

The report highlighted the potential for a “coherent and comprehensive waste separation and recycling programme could be one of the most important legacy projects for South Africa” but it appears that in practice little has changed, and in the absence of widespread kerbside collections, recycling in South Africa remains highly dependent on informal waste-picking at landfill sites.

Legislatively, Brazil appears to be a little way ahead. After years of political wrangling, the country introduced a National Solid Waste Policy in 2010. Hitherto, almost all waste in Brazil was landfilled. Up to 60% of the nation’s waste had been disposed of at more or less informal dump sites. Even where formal landfill sites were used, most were poorly managed, with little in the way of lining or cover. Fewer than 10% of the nation’s 5,500 municipalities that have responsibility for waste had recycling schemes in place.

The new law required municipalities to implement local plans and to close their insanitary landfill sites by 2014. It instituted a drive for Energy from Waste, both in the form of incineration and methane capture from landfill. For some kinds of waste, especially pesticides, batteries, tyres, lubricants, fluorescent bulbs, and WEEE, it introduced producer responsibility schemes, and a requirement to implement reverse logistics so that products placed on the market could be taken back.

Sweeper system

It also recognised the economically critical role that waste picking has for hundreds of thousands of Brazilians. Despite its lack of formal collection systems, Brazil was able to achieve remarkably high levels of aluminium and PET recycling thanks to the efforts of waste pickers operating on its dumping grounds. Rather than look to supplant them, the government has sought to integrate waste pickers into the recycling system.

Pick and unmix -Brazil’s waste pickers are an integral part of the country’s recycling system.  Photo by Jackson Muller, via Wikimedia Commons.

Waste pickers in Brazil are remarkably organised and influential, according to an excellent report by Kim Beecheno. The first National Congress of Brazilian Waste Pickers was held in 2001, leading to the creation of the National Movement for Collectors of Recyclables, which conducts campaigns and represents waste pickers to the government, and forming links with other waste picker groups from around the world. It also campaigns against incineration, which it sees as depriving waste pickers of potential income.

Many categories of waste picker are recognised in Brazil’s labour statistics, giving a clear picture of their numbers and the significant role their work has in keeping some of Brazil’s poorest people above the bread line. Since 2007, municipalities have been allowed to hire waste picker associations to perform segregated waste collection and urban cleaning services without the associations having to bid for contracts.

The National Waste Plan made the involvement of waste picker co-operatives in municipal waste management plans a pre-requisite for municipalities seeking federal resources. It also made grants available for waste pickers to buy equipment and invest in infrastructure. Where new kerbside recycling collections are being implemented, the intention is that material should be delivered to the cooperatives for them to separate and sell on.

Much of Brazil’s preparation for the World Cup has bordered on the shambolic, as the encyclopaedic Tim Vickery has expertly detailed. The staging of the event has been fraught with problems, many of them avoidable, with construction delays and failure to secure private finance leading to vastly inflated costs for Brazilian taxpayers. The sorely needed public transport projects that should have been the legacy of the cup have been for the most part abandoned, and for many Brazilians the event is no longer a cause for celebration but for protest: 61% now feel that hosting the World Cup was a bad idea.

However, if it can be linked in to the powerful and effective network of waste picker cooperatives, stadium waste management need not be a complete own goal for Brazil’s organising committee. One could wish for greater ambition and vision higher up the waste hierarchy, for an attempt to tackle food waste and a clearer waste management legacy, but even events hosted in countries with far more developed waste infrastructure rarely meet such standards. Thanks to the approach Brazil is taking to recycling, the World Cup’s waste arisings do at least present an opportunity to achieve socially beneficial outcomes while making the 2014 tournament one of the most resource-efficient on record.