Fishers are pulling an astonishing amount of upholstered furniture from the mud as they look for recyclable materials.

BVRio has taken part in a workshop for the co-creation of Circularity of Plastics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, promoted by the Circular Plastics in the Americas Programme (CPAP) on 24 August.

Often deemed hard to recycle, beverage cartons are the focus of a new initiative run by Circular Action, a BVRio group company, in partnership with Tetra Pak and Packaging Recycling Organisation Vietnam (PRO Vietnam), which will not only provide a recycling solution, but which will also deliver additional income to potentially hundreds of informal waste pickers.

Since April this year, the second phase of our 'Fishing for litter' project has been supporting 25 families from Ilha do Governador, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to remove waste from Guanabara Bay.

In June, BVRio completed an 18-month-long pilot project in partnership with PREVENT Waste Alliance that benefited ten Brazilian waste picker cooperatives and a Mexican network of collectors through the issuance of circular credits.

BVRio’s circular economy specialist, Pedro Succar, presented the results of a market study conducted by BVRio in 2021 on plastic circularity in Brazil at the opening event of the Circular Plastics Programme in the Americas (CPAP), in Rio de Janeiro

In support of this year’s United Nations World Oceans Day, we have looked back on our decade of activities in developing market mechanisms to support initiatives that remove or prevent ocean pollution, and we are celebrating those initiatives on the Circular Action Hub who do the same.

BVRio has today, as part of a group of voluntary standard setters under the PREVENT Waste Alliance and with support from the ValuCred consortium, released a joint statement welcoming the resolution ‘End plastic pollution: Towards an international legally binding instrument’ adopted at the fifth session of the UN Environment Assembly (UNEA-5) in Nairobi.

BVRio's project in partnership with the Italian social enterprise Ogyre featured on the cover of O Globo, a mainstream newspaper in Brazil, over the weekend. The reporter Ludmilla Lima went to meet the fishers, who are now earning a salary collecting waste from Guanabara Bay through the project, after seeing the fish almost disappear in less than two decades from their coastline very much in part because of pollution.

BVRio’s circular action team has expanded this month with the addition of two new members of staff, who will increase capacity and help further develop services for both producers looking for ways to meet EPR and CSER commitments and local waste management initiatives.