Any sort of waste management and recycling reconnaissance in Tegucigalpa was inevitably going to lead us to Reciclaje Diamante. This company is to recycling in Honduras the way Google is to online search – they’ve cornered the market in no uncertain terms. We were introduced to Diamante earlier in the week by AFE’s security guard who used to sell his recyclables to the businessman who started the company some 20 years ago. Diamante’s founder developed personal relationships with the people who worked on the landfill, solidifying arrangements that dictated sales of recyclables to only him. This founded the beginnings of Honduras’ largest consolidator and exporter of recycling materials.

We were able to get a meeting with their GM under the guise of being a “group from the US doing research on recycling in Honduras …” With our new found luck, we drove up the entrance of Diamante and were greeted by a security guard and two giant red swinging steel doors(see pics). This place was built into the side of a hill and guarded like a fortress. What could be so important you ask? Well, as we made our way into the compound it was pretty apparent that this was a major operation.

Diamante purchases large bulk quantity recycled commodities from basically anyone that will sell to them. Their compound is split into 3 levels each dedicated to one of their main commodities, scrap metal or iron, aluminum, and plastic bottles. The main entrance puts you on the middle level right in front of a giant warehouse completely devoted to storing and compacting bags of aluminum cans. It seemed like they had several weeks’ worth of work backlogged with a couple thousand bags of cans waiting around to be crushed into smaller aluminum cubes. Our next stop took us to the lower level which is entirely dedicated to recycling and grinding plastic bottles. The clear and colored plastic bottles are sorted, ground into fine mulch, washed, and then prepped for shipment. After touring a state of the art warehouse and sorting facility on the first 2 levels I was ready for more of the same on the top level. Much to my dismay, the top level was just a big mess of scrap metal consisting of anything from rebar to car frames sitting around in a big dirt yard. It was an extremely dangerous environment with sharp metal objects littering the ground and not a safe place for the two women accompanying me in sandals and high-heels. A large claw, similar to something in a stuffed animal vending machine game, grabs as much scrap metal as possible and drops it into a compressor which then spits out an iron cube. Once in their final compacted “state” the recycled commodities are put in shipping containers destined for the US, China, & Chile- per our host.

Our tour concluded with a brief chat about the state of recycling in Tegucigalpa. We were told that Diamante has worked with the mayor’s office on recycling campaigns and waste management education in the hopes of improving the overall recycling culture of the city. The results were not what they had hoped –people participated for a couple of weeks before reverting back to old habits. Why don’t they work we asked ourselves? Is it because they don’t see the direct social and environmental benefits it has on their city? What types of incentives, outside of monetary, need to be offered in order to establish sustainable recycling programs?

After our meeting with Diamante it was time to go upstream on the value chain and visit the “middlemen” stationed on the road outside the landfill. They are the main buyers of recyclables from the waste pickers who work on the landfill. They are lined up on the road just outside the entrance to the landfill and their operations consist of a small plot of land to consolidate and store recyclables and access to transportation (see pics). We needed to better understand how they operated, what kind of prices they were paying the waste pickers, and who they were selling to. Since this is confidential information in most companies (legit or not) we would have to tread lightly. Knowing the various middlemen would be more suspicious of an overly inquisitive gringo, I asked our translator, Tino, to play sleuth. One after another, Tino struck up conversation with whoever was working at these various places to see what he could find out. We visited 6 middlemen and while most were apprehensive we (and when I say “we,” I mean my translator) did pry some good info out of them. Their business model is as simple as “buy low & sell high” gets. Depending on the market prices for commodities they can make upwards of a 70%-80% profit margin on plastic bottles just by purchasing and consolidating from the landfill waste-pickers and transporting about 5km down the street to Diamante.

The more we learn about the underbelly of the recycling supply chain in Tegucigalpa, the more we feel there are some great opportunities to elevate the landfill inhabitants out of poverty. We have a list of some good ideas that need to be worked out over the next few months. We think our biggest test is going to be selling the idea of change to the community of people living in the landfill because they have been promised many things over the years and none have been delivered. Understandably so, they are a suspicious bunch and we expect them to be resistant to anything new that we present. Harnessing that resistance into something positive will be challenging…by not impossible.