This paper examines the challenges and opportunities of transforming collection and recycling systems in Brazil’s cities, sets out a shared vision for what these systems could look like by 2040, and identifies the actions needed to get there. It closes with specific calls to action for policymakers, municipalities, businesses, waste picker organisations, financial institutions, and philanthropies.
Part of a bigger picture: the 2030 Plastics Agenda
Tackling plastic pollution requires action across the entire system. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation's 2030 Plastics Agenda for Business identifies three systemic barriers that must be overcome to address plastic pollution at scale: scaling reusereuseThe repeated use of a product or component for its intended purpose without significant modification., tackling flexible packaging waste, and addressing gaps in collection and recycling systems. Each demands its own focused response. This paper focuses on the third.
Well-functioning collection and recycling infrastructure is a permanent and necessary feature of any circular economycircular economyA systems solution framework that tackles global challenges like climate change, biodiversity loss, waste, and pollution. It is based on three principles, driven by design: eliminate waste and pollution, circulate products and materials (at their highest value), and regenerate nature. — keeping materials in use and out of the environment. Right now, in too many places, those systems don't exist at the scale required. The consequences are playing out every year, as millions of tonnes of plastic leak into land, freshwater, and marine ecosystems.
A collaborative effort
Closing the Loop is the product of a six-month collaborative process led by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and Clean Rivers. It brings together insights from more than 80 stakeholders spanning Brazil's entire waste management value chain — policymakers, waste picker organisations, businesses, academia, NGOs, intergovernmental organisations, financial institutions, and philanthropies. Their input gives this paper both its analytical grounding and its practical ambition, drawing on extensive data research and in-depth engagement across Brazil, including interviews, workshops, and site visits across different regions.
Where Brazil stands today
Brazil's waste management system has real strengths and significant structural gaps. Collection reaches approximately 92.4% of the population, and the country has built a comprehensive national policy framework for waste management. However, around 26% of the urban solid waste collected in Brazil still receives inadequate disposal. While 36% of municipal solid waste is made up of recyclable materials, less than 9% reaches recycling. Mismanaged plastic waste alone is estimated at 3.5 million tonnes annually, with an estimated 1.3 million tonnes entering drainage systems, accumulating in rivers, and ultimately threatening the terrestrial, freshwater and marine ecosystems and communities that depend on them.
The consequences extend well beyond visible pollution. There is environmental contamination, public health impacts, climate costs, and the loss of recoverable materials. Each year, recyclable materials worth approximately BRL 14 billion are lost to landfill rather than recovered.
Regional inequality runs through all of this. The regions with the least capacity to manage waste well are also those where the Amazon, the Pantanal, and other globally significant ecosystems bear the greatest environmental impacts.
Behind the data is a human story. An estimated 800,000 waste pickers already underpin Brazil's recycling system — recovering the majority of the country's recyclable materials, largely outside formal recognition or fair pay. Without waste pickers, the recycling system as it currently exists would not function, but their contribution comes at a significant human cost. Improvements are being made, but the pace needs to accelerate on terms set by waste pickers: better working conditions, fairer remuneration for the service they provide, and access to public social benefits and stable incomes.
A shared vision for 2040
Through the collaborative process that produced this paper, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, Clean Rivers, and more than 80 organisations co-created a shared vision of what Brazilian cities' waste management and recycling systems could achieve by 2040 — ambitious, but achievable across different local contexts.
That vision centres on six outcomes:
The paper sets out a nine-module framework for system transformation, maps that framework onto four city archetypes reflecting Brazil's regional diversity, and identifies the specific actions needed from every part of the system.
Calls to action
Closing the structural gaps requires coordinated transformation across the value chain — and every part of the system moving together. The paper contains tailored calls to action for stakeholders across the waste management system:
Policymakers and regulators
Municipalities and concessionaries
Households and large generators
The waste picker ecosystem
Recyclers, producers, and end-market buyers
System enablers, including financial institutions and philanthropies
The beginning, not the end
This paper is the first phase of a longer transformation effort. It is not a prescriptive operational roadmap, nor a definitive or universal blueprint — it is a foundation for collaborative efforts, grounded in the Brazilian context and designed to build shared understanding and inform what follows. The intent is to test and refine system transformation at city level, with a particular focus on developing sustainable financing mechanisms, and use learnings to inform national scale-up through policy change. The approach developed here is designed to be adaptable to other countries and contexts.
Closing the Loop: Transforming urban waste systems and protecting Brazil’s rivers is available in English and Portuguese.
