We were ready to stop the recycling program…

We are in Costa Rica, in a rural area where roads aren’t easy to drive.

We started the Recycling Center in 2021 because they weren’t any proper recycling initiatives in our area.

Last December(2024) the municipality from the nearest town came to visit our village and told us that they will begin a Recycling campaign in January.

We were no expecting this change at all, and for a moment we wondered what to do.

Caring for a recycling center it’s a lot of work, yet we were happy to provide this service.

By having the municipality sending trucks to collect Trash and Recycling, suddenly it made not much sense to keep on doing this part.

So we decided to close and restructure ourselves, waiting to see how the municipality campaign would unfold. Still we were determined to keep on offering alternatives to “trash” to landfills.

And then…

Mid January, we learn that the Municipality Campaign won’t happen this year, for not having the necessary funds.

We were ready to stop doing this part completely, in some ways it was a relief because it’s a lot of work…

But nop ! we actually had to re open !

This break allowed us to get more perspective and make some changes in the way we operate :

We are open every 2 weeks instead of every week, and we open for 7 h instead of 5h.

We were able to send a lot of materials to a bigger recycling center, and reorganize our spaces, looking to simplify our systems.

We realized that the recycling center that we have build so far is a prototype to a future version : From being a private project, we wish to evolve more into a public project, recognized and supported by the municipality. We wish to work with local associations, to get better communication, and more recycling happening.

We may create a foundation, to be able to receive volunteers in exchange of a year visa.

All these changes won’t happen overnight, yet we see clearer our future steps, all of it is meant to evolve.

Hands on the land the past 2 months:

During this period of changes we still kept being active, it gave us the space to process materials that we had accumulated.

We were able to process all the Soft Plastic into Ubuntu blocks, and shred a lot of Hard Plastic.

And that feels great, as we are becoming closer to be up to date !

We are conceiving a machine to precut hard plastic into smaller pieces to be able to Shredd them. We are working together with a metal workshop to make this happen.

We are making connections we local vendors to recirculate glass Jars and bottles. We are learning to do the best to collect what they want, as well as communicating with the local community to help us, reminding them that glass can be reused many times, and that vendors are interested to do so.

We had to send various messages in the local groups of the area to the update everyone with changes of the past 2 month, in English and in Spanish.

We get so much appreciation from the people around us, this recycling center truly became part of this village. And bit by bit, everyone get to know what it offers.

Some locals never came for the last 3 years, and by making this pause and new announcements, more people are becoming interested.

We are grateful we can support our community in that way, and we are looking forward to continue doing our best, making improvements, envisioning the future of Recycling in our Bio region.

Thank you for reading us.