A digital platform to recognize informal waste recovery in Colombia

In Colombia, informal waste pickers collect the majority of recycled materials but struggle to access financing for this activity and are not formally recognized by the system. In 2018, the government launched an Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) program for packaging, which has been fully operational since 2021. This scheme requires that manufacturers and importers finance the collection and recycling of waste generated by their products.

However, informal waste pickers, who carry out the bulk of waste collection work across the country, are unable to access this funding, primarily due to a lack of traceability and recognition of this informal labor. The majority of these informal waste pickers are women, who scratch out a living by reselling the materials collected to intermediaries at very low prices, and are denied access to social protection or financial services, which generally require a stable and formal source of income.

The Yubarta Circular Platform aims to directly connect informal waste pickers with the documents required to unlock EPR funding, already produced by stakeholders across the value chain, thus eliminating the need to use a smartphone or app. Processing certificates, purchase and sales invoices, and operational records will be automatically linked and verified with unique identifiers to prevent duplicates and ensure consistency in the volumes, dates, and materials reported. Once this data has been validated, the platform generates a digital certificate of conformity. As a result, payments related to extended producer responsibility can be distributed more equitably across the entire value chain, including to waste pickers and associations, while providing producers with verifiable proof of their recycling performance and a source of revenue recognized by financial institutions.

The project will also monitor the link between these traceable flows via the platform and access to financial services, in partnership with Banco Mundo Mujer, a financial institution created to encourage women entrepreneurs' participation in the local economy by providing access to microcredit and economic inclusion.

Yubarta will use the FID preparation grant to trial a pilot version of the platform over six months, under real-world conditions, with fifteen waste picker associations, five traders, two recyclers, and two producers, in order to better understand the various stakeholders' use of the platform, the quality of data generated, and the feasibility of direct payments.

During the platform testing phase, the project aims to demonstrate the technical feasibility, user acceptability, and financial viability of a new Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) traceability model in Colombia.

The main deliverables are:

• Validate take-up of the platform by waste pickers and their associations by providing training for learners with low literacy levels.
• Reduce rejection rates of EPR declarations by producing reliable, consistent, and verifiable data for producers and regulatory authorities.
• Demonstrate the feasibility of direct payments to waste pickers, potentially increasing the income of individual collectors by 5 to 8%.
• Evaluate links between traceable EPR payments and microcredit access.

Over the next five years, Yubarta aims to reach 10,000 waste pickers from 300 associations, and 40 producers across Colombia, before expanding throughout Latin America to include 50,000 waste pickers within ten years.