This is the third in a series of blogs from the finalists of this year’s Policy Idol competition. These blogs were originally presented as policy pitches at the live final of the competition earlier this year. Policy Idol is an annual competition open to all staff and students at King’s.
By Luca Brockmann and Antonio Manzi Gari
Even though Uruguay was picked in 2013 as country of the year by The Economist, mainly due to its progressive social reforms, it still faces deeply entrenched social problems. Among these is the situation of the informal waste collectors, the ‘clasificadores’, whose main source of income is generated by searching for recyclable materials in landfills and residential waste containers which they can take to deposits or recycling plants to be sold. From the limited data available, we estimate that around 4,000 households in Uruguay depend on this ‘trash market’ as their main source of income, which translates to about 18,000 people. Moreover, more than 5,500 of them (28 per cent) are estimated to be children under the age of 14. Continue reading →