Engineer Hortensia Solís Agüero

Manager of Sustainable I+D Projects

E-mail: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Telephone: (506) 25412828

Fax: (506) 25412728 

In 2005, the cooperative started a recycling program in its own facilities to treat the waste created by the different departments adequately. In the first phase of the project, materials were classified in the following manner:

Containers: plastic, glass, aluminum.

Paper: cardboard, newspaper, white and colored. 

To create a recycling culture in the company, 87 employees were trained the same year; after that, people from the community found out about the recycling program and many of them had the initiative to recycle their own waste and bring them to cooperatives recycling center. Since there was an increase in waste products the cooperative had to invest in the construction of a new building to be able to have a larger operating plant.  

Due to the interest of the inhabitants of Santa María de Dota in 2007, the cooperative ran a pilot plan as a communal project, made up of 6 students from the local high school, CTP Jose Daniel Flores Zavaleta, whom were previously trained in the management of waste products. The project consisted of training and collection of reusable materials in the urbanization called el Guayabal, made up of 53 houses, in which 44 participated; therefore, were taken into consideration for the investigation and validation of the recycling program.   

The project lasted 8 weeks, when the first phase began 24 of the houses didn’t recycle, but when the pilot plan ended, only 16 houses didn’t recycle, resulting in 28 houses that adapted to and applied the recycling program.  For 2009 the recycling program is extended to the whole community of Santa Maria, and to do so, an agreement was written and signed between Coopedota and the local Municipality focused on the following aspects:

1.        Help the environment.

2.        Keep the community clean and healthy.

3.        Encourage a culture of using existing resources.

4.        Increase the lifespan of the municipal landfill. 

Visit the photo  gallery for this article. 

The waste collection started on October 15 of 2008, where the community was separated in two different sectors according to streets and developments:Sector 1: Higueronal, Las Áreas, El IMAS, El Guayabal, Copey, Las Nubes.
Sector 2: Santa María de Dota Center, San Marcos Street, San Rafael. The municipality collects waste every Tuesday and alternates the sectors weekly to help make the recollection, sorting and dispatching processes more effective. As far as waste that isn’t considered recyclable, the municipality collects every Friday, in both sectors to transfer to the landfill.  

So the project would be successful, the cooperative trained 17 students from the local high school, and divided them into 5 different groups for communal projects. Since it was 5 groups, they divided the town into sectors so that all of the houses would be visited to explain how the waste should be sorted. A total of 660 houses received the lecture, of which 656 agreed to recycle, and 4 didn’t want participate. Also 62 businesses, 378 students from the primary school, and 131 students from the high school were trained in the recycling program.