How to Recycle in Chile

In Chile, recycling is not a common habit. 80% of the people don't recycle regularly [1] and only about 10% of Chilean waste is recycled [2]. However, considering only domestic waste, the last number drops to barely 1.9% [3].

Recycling isn't a simple task mainly because of 3 reasons. First, Chile lacks a public policy to collect waste in separate containers from houses, so it's people's responsibility to find places where to recycle in their cities and go visit them in regular bases. Second, these recycle locations are usually scarce and poor in terms of variety; In deed, most of them are for recycling glass and plastic bottles only. And third, recycling per se is not a straightforward process because in order to do it properly there are special steps to follow according to each material.

Chances are if you're a foreigner coming to Chile and willing to recycle during your stay, it won't be easy for you to get help on how to do it. In this sense, finding someone to teach you about it would be difficult considering that it's not part of our culture yet. Furthermore, the information available on how to do it in this country is usually in Spanish and not easy to find in English.

With the aforementioned reasons in mind, I decided to write a series of articles as an attempt to provide foreigners information on how to recycle in Chile. It's important to notice that the knowledge gathered here goes according to the information suggested by the Chilean Ministry of Environment on their website.

Below you can find the links to the articles I wrote, classified by material.

1. Organic waste

2. Plastic

3. Glass

4. Paper

5. Metal cans

6. Cardboard

In order to find places to recycle in your city, you can use the map provided by the Ministry of Environment on their website. However, a quick look made me realize that it isn't as complete as it should be, so I recommend to complement it with information found on some other sites such as each city's counsil website. Notice though, that not every counsil provides this content online.

If you take a look on the maps, you'll realize that there are places where to recycle other materials that I didn't mention above. These include: batteries, smartphones, used cooking oil and beverage cartons (tetra pak packages).

Another thing that you might notice is that on the maps, the places to recycle are calssified in 2 types: greens disposal points and clean disposal points ("puntos verdes" and "puntos limpios" in Spanish).

Clean disposal point

The main differences between the two are that clean disposal points are bigger than the green ones, they receive a wider variety of materials and, unlike green disposal points, they have some workers in the place. These employees can help the people and also monitor the materials and their conditions in which they are brought. They might also do some preprocessing of the materials before sending them to the recycle plants. Notice that small cities might only have green points, which are much more common to find.

Green disposal point

Unfortunately only a few big cities have clean disposal points, whereas most of them only have green points. What makes it worse is that these locations usually receive barely glass or plastic bottles. The reality is that all the other materials that are supposed to be recycled in this country happen to be recycled in a much smaller scale and in just a few cities.

However, recycling isn't the only solution to being ecofriendly. Apart from organic waste, most of our daily trash are plastic products. To deal with the organic waste, I showed you some alternatives in the post number one mentioned early. As for the plastic products, my proposal is to try and live a plastic-free life. Of course this might sound crazy or imposible, but by trying to achieve this objective you'll be surprised by how much you can reduce you plastic dependency. If you are interested in knowing more about my personal experience trying to reduce my waste in a small city of Chile, visit the following post.

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References:

[1] https://www.publimetro.cl/cl/noticias/2018/05/17/dia-del-reciclaje-las-cifras-la-basura-chile.html

[2] https://www.diariosustentable.com/conciencia-verde/el-reciclaje-las-cifras-en-chile/

[3] https://sinia.mma.gob.cl/estado-del-medio-ambiente/residuos-2/