XIMENA LAVERDE
Diego Armando Espitia Cobos
Universidad Externado de Colombia
Gustavo A Yepes López
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"One of the five (5) lines of service that Ecopositiva S.A.S. E.S.P. offers its customers / suppliers is the destruction and protection of brand from their usable waste. Thanks to this service, customers / suppliers reduce the environmental impacts caused from the waste they generate, by significantly increasing their potential for reuse and recycling." This innovation involved the Board of Directors of Ecopositiva S.A.S. E.S.P.(CEO - Arturo Rojas).
This initiative emerged in 2016, with the mission of providing solutions to customers in the management of their usable waste, in order to reduce the waste generated and reintegrate part of these materials into the production cycle, maximizing their resources.
"The management of destruction and brand protection of the usable waste includes: reception, unloading, processing, storage and control of inventories. All these activities are carried out always seeking to mitigate the impacts caused to the environment. " (CEO - Arturo Rojas).
Brand Protection is an idea to process waste brand material from the companies, preserving the brand for instance by destroying publicity and recycling defective products.
The first step is the reception and weighing of the waste in the ECOPOSITIVA's plant, which has a satellite monitoring system on vehicles for the transport of usable, dangerous and special waste with different storage capacity and a floor scale for the weighing in site, as well as the ideal human team to carry out the process.
Once the waste is weighed in the trucks, it is unloaded by the personnel and taken to the storage cells in the ECOPOSITIVA warehouses, with a capacity between 3 and 4 tons. There begins the process of separation and segregation of usable waste like plastic type 1 and type 2, glass, cardboard, folding and metal, for further processing.
Plastics
In the cells they are stored in tarpaulins of a capacity of 1 ton, big bag, they are taken to the mill and/or agglutinating machine which crushes them and they are deposited again in the big bags. According to the characteristics of the plastic, after grinding, the material is taken to the pelletizing process in which the plastic is transformed into pellets, which are returned to the industry to reincorporate into the production cycle.
Glass
The segregation of the glass consists of separating the material in flat glass and round glass, and then in colors, amber, transparent, blue and green. After, they are taken to the shredding machine so that any kind of stamp, word or logo are destroyed.
Cardboard and folding
The cartons and folding are in turn segregated and stacked in big bags, which are taken to the horizontal compactor to be compressed.
Metal
The metal is segregated into usable and unusable, the usable metal is stacked in big bags and taken to the scrap container. The metal classified as ordinary is stacked in waste balloons for final disposal, in accordance with the client's stipulations.
Once the usable waste is obtained, they are available to the customers/suppliers for reuse.
In Colombia, around 27,300 tons of waste are produced daily, with an average per person close to 1 kg, among all types of waste (residential, industrial, commercial, institutional and street sweeping and public areas). As of 2015, 10,037,500 tons of solid waste were produced each year, of which only 10% was recovered (Bogotá Humana, 2015).
The same year the capital of Colombia, Bogotá, produced approximately 6,500 tons of solid waste daily. In 2018, El Tiempo reported 7,500 tons a day, of which about 70% had the potential for recycling, reuse and other types of exploitation (Bogotá Humana, 2015). In accordance with these facts, Ecopositiva emerged to provide a solution to the problem of solid waste management and disposal in the city of Bogotá.
Arturo Rojas, CEO, started in this business doing the management of domestic waste in residential complexes in Bogotá. For its operation, he came to rent a warehouse located south of the city and then moved to downtown in an old neighborhood called the Bronx. Unfortunately, both times he was a victim of theft in his warehouses, losing his merchandise. After those incidents, he considered abandoning the idea of working in recycling and waste management. At that time, the partner who accompanied him decided to retire.
Subsequently, he met with an old friend who was knowledgeable about waste, and he encouraged him to continue in the business. Together they formed a formal company for waste management, but this time not working with household waste, but instead waste from industry.
From there, Ecopositiva has been providing the services of integral management of usable, dangerous and special waste to important companies located in Bogota, and in turn, manufacturing products made with 100% recycled materials.
In this case, Brand Protection is referring to a process of destructing and recycling industrial waste which contains for instance logos, documentation, pieces of furniture, publicity, racks, defective product or any other company's elements with brand identification as a result of the manufacturing operation. Ecopositiva, a waste management business model, is offering to the companies an option to avoid that this industrial-waste-material reaches landfills.
Bogota city, Ecopostiva's headquarters, and Colombia's capital produces about 7,500 tons of waste per day, and 2.2 million of tons per year, recycling the insignificant rate between 14% - 15% (One the largest landfills of the country is in Bogota. Doña Juana landfill stores 19.99% of the waste in the country and authorities have said that its storage capacity will be complete for 2022). Currently, this is not the only problem the city is dealing with; the poverty rate is also a massively complex issue, not only because of the Colombian population but also the immigrant population from Venezuela.
There are two main aspects where Ecopositiva is focused. The first one it is to reduce the among of industrial waste reaching landfills and the second it is to be able to increase the number of dignified jobs.
In the beginning, the company was just made up by Arturo and his university partner. Nowadays, about a hundred employees are part of the whole organization which means that this type of business models can generate an important amount of jobs. In that way, the company is fundamental to improving the community's quality of life. Through technical and professional training, they are also acquiring marketable skills and also paid with a yearly salary.
Ecopositiva's brand-protection-process includes reception, unloading, processing, storing, and inventory control. In this procedure, plastic, glass, steel, and paper are part of the recycling line, resulting in products such as recycled plastic pellets. The only way to protect the planet is to include all actors in society. This business model asserts that companies can start to participate in that process by implementing systems like Ecopositiva's to prevent their industrial brand material and waste from going to the at-capacity landfills.
Ecopositiva's nameplate capacity is approximately 48 tons per day of waste, transforming those materials through its line of recycling. In comparison with the waste produced in Bogota, the job realized by Ecopositiva's brand-protection-idea could be a constructive method to enhance the protection of the environment if they can strengthen and expand its nameplate capacity.
In its business model, Ecopositiva S.A.S. ESP, determined its main profit comes from the waste management systems from industry, especially industrial companies whose quality assurance policies establish suppliers services as part of their value chains. To be part of the corporate integral management system of its clients, Ecopositiva recognized it was necessary to offer a sustainable solution to the generation of waste as a result of the entire productive process of Colombian companies.
Being part of the integrated management system of its clients, Ecopositiva has also bet on quality certifications, thus expanding its market to new clients. According to Arturo Rojas-CEO, "voice to voice" has made the company more known among companies that generate differentiating value in an economic sector that is highly informal in Colombia. Government policies have been weak in strengthening this business model where adequate and sustainable waste treatment is carried out, however, Colombia, as one of the drivers of the 17 sustainable development objectives, has motivated government institutions to generate support from the bank by financing ideas to combat the social and environmental detriment of the planet by the industry.
According to the DANE (National Administrative Department of Statistics), Colombia has large gaps in the income of its inhabitants, from the estimate of 45.5 million reported in the census conducted this year (2018) and contrasting with a report in March of this same year, shows that 17% of the population is in a situation of multidimensional poverty, 26.9% of monetary poverty and 7.4% in extreme poverty. Thus it is clearly fundamental that inclusive companies such as Ecopositiva, which offers an employment opportunity to vulnerable sectors of the population, to be increasingly financially supported and that through the legislature the capacity to promote the overcoming of inequality gaps in the country can be expanded.
The company seeks economic growth, but proportionally to the development of the person, and in training employees, the company furthers opportunities for people to acquire knowledge and expertise in the activities carried out in the productive process.
The newspaper “El Tiempo” in October of this year, published that Colombia produces 11.3 million tons of garbage and only takes advantage of 1.8%.
"The high generation of waste, the scarce separation of garbage, the low use and treatment of those that can be recycled, as well as an inadequate handling of dangerous waste, are some of the problems that the country faces in its treatment of waste. " (Duque, El Tiempo )
The Office of the Comptroller assures that for 2022, for example, the “Doña Juana” landfill covers its maximum capacity, this reception represents 19.9% of all waste generated in the country, and due to its location outside Bogotá and adjacent to communities that are less than 1000 meters as required by the standard, is a critical issue for the country.
As a waste management company, Ecopositiva does its part to limit what goes into the landfill and make materials usable again.
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ECOPOSITIVA provides a solution to problem of solid waste management and disposal from the industry in Bogotá. The company's mission is "to carry out the integral management of usable, dangerous and special waste generated by the industry, contributing to the reduction of waste sent to Sanitary Landfills." Internally, the company also promotes the principles of honesty, respect and commitment.
