Colombian Influencer Puts the Pizzazz into Recycling

Sara Samanieg has become an unofficial spokeswoman for the 74,000 people who rummage through the garbage of Latin America's fourth-biggest economy every day. Raul ARBOLEDA / AFP
Sara Samanieg has become an unofficial spokeswoman for the 74,000 people who rummage through the garbage of Latin America's fourth-biggest economy every day. Raul ARBOLEDA / AFP
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Colombian Influencer Puts the Pizzazz into Recycling

Sara Samanieg has become an unofficial spokeswoman for the 74,000 people who rummage through the garbage of Latin America's fourth-biggest economy every day. Raul ARBOLEDA / AFP
Sara Samanieg has become an unofficial spokeswoman for the 74,000 people who rummage through the garbage of Latin America's fourth-biggest economy every day. Raul ARBOLEDA / AFP

Colombian influencer Sara Samaniego braids her long straight hair, checks her make-up in a mirror, places her phone in the center of a ring light and flashes a big smile for the camera.

"Hola mis recicla-amores! (Hello my recycling loves)," the 32-year-old, who is on a mission to teach Colombians how to sort their waste, says to greet her half-a-million Instagram followers, AFP reported.

Samaniego, who wears blue overalls and a baseball cap on backwards as part of her "Marce, la recicladora" (Marce, the recycler) social media alter ego, has also become an unofficial spokeswoman for the 74,000 people who rummage through the garbage of Latin America's fourth-biggest economy every day.

Colombian cities have no public recycling systems.

Instead, they rely on informal waste pickers to go through bins and garbage left out for collection to salvage cardboard, glass, plastic and other reusable materials.

Across the world, between 20 and 34 million people play a crucial role in environmental protection by collecting and sorting waste recyclables -- dirty, dangerous work for which most are paid a pittance.

Making ends meet

Throughout the developing world, waste pickers can be seen pulling carts laden high with bric-a-brac through dense traffic.

Samaniego tries to boost their visibility by profiling waste pickers on her YouTube and Instagram accounts.

She "encourages people to understand the work of recyclers from the inside," Zoraya Avendano, the manager of a warehouse where the recyclers sell their wares for a few pesos, told AFP.

Bogota, a city of eight million people, produces 9,000 tons of waste each day, according to a 2023 Greenpeace report, of which 17 percent is recycled -- the same proportion as New York, according to the GrowNYC recycling group.

Recycler Mary Luz Torres, 50, spends two hours travelling by bus from her home in the working-class south of Bogota to the wealthier north, where she plies her trade.

A fluorescent vest is her only form of protection from the cars and trucks zooming past, as she lugs a cart spray-painted with her name through the street.

"You have to go out and find a way to make ends meet," she said.

Pedro Talero, 55, spends his days collecting trash, which he sorts by night under a bridge.

On a good day he earns around $20, double the minimum wage.

"Some people look down on us," he said, but added that growing environmental awareness is leading to greater recognition of "our services to the planet."

Growing recognition

Colombia's leftist President Gustavo Petro last year rewarded the work of waste pickers by giving them a monopoly on recycling for 15 years.

"If traditional informal recyclers are compensated, we lift many people out of poverty. We lift many children out of child labor. We lift many women out of indignity," Petro said, crediting them with "improving the balance between humankind and nature."

Samaniego's contribution has been an attempt to glamorize the trade, with how-to posts set to tracks by Colombian stars such as Shakira and Karol G.

Born in Bogota, she developed a passion for nature on childhood holidays in the countryside.

Making a documentary about recycling while studying communications put her on the path to environmental influencer.

When she launched her YouTube channel six years ago, she said, there were "a lot of videos about music, dance, cooking, sports but the environment was rarely discussed."

Samaniego's winning formula is to inject levity into a subject characterized by earnestness.

The response has been thousands of questions and comments on her posts each day, and growing renown.

She gets stopped on the street for selfies, was recently a special guest on a TV reality show and is regularly invited to give talks at schools and businesses.

She owes much of her knowledge to informal recyclers, whom she calls her teachers.

To repay them, she fundraises on social media to buy them equipment, such as safety gloves and face masks, or to send them on a well-deserved holiday to the sea.

"I am fulfilling my goal of being an agent of change in the country," she says.



NASA Astronauts Return to Earth after Drawn-out Mission in Space

Support teams work around a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft shortly after it landed with NASA astronauts Nick Hague, Suni Williams, Butch Wilmore, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov aboard in the water off the coast of Tallahassee, Florida, USA, 18 March 2025. EPA/NASA/Keegan Barber
Support teams work around a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft shortly after it landed with NASA astronauts Nick Hague, Suni Williams, Butch Wilmore, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov aboard in the water off the coast of Tallahassee, Florida, USA, 18 March 2025. EPA/NASA/Keegan Barber
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NASA Astronauts Return to Earth after Drawn-out Mission in Space

Support teams work around a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft shortly after it landed with NASA astronauts Nick Hague, Suni Williams, Butch Wilmore, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov aboard in the water off the coast of Tallahassee, Florida, USA, 18 March 2025. EPA/NASA/Keegan Barber
Support teams work around a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft shortly after it landed with NASA astronauts Nick Hague, Suni Williams, Butch Wilmore, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov aboard in the water off the coast of Tallahassee, Florida, USA, 18 March 2025. EPA/NASA/Keegan Barber

NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams returned to Earth in a SpaceX capsule on Tuesday with a soft splashdown off Florida's coast, nine months after their faulty Boeing Starliner craft upended what was to be a week-long stay on the International Space Station.
Their return caps a protracted space mission that was fraught with uncertainty and technical troubles, turning a rare instance of NASA's contingency planning - and the latest failures of Starliner - into a global and political spectacle, Reuters reported.
Wilmore and Williams, two veteran NASA astronauts and retired US Navy test pilots, had launched into space as Starliner's first crew in June for what was expected to be an eight-day test mission. But issues with Starliner's propulsion system led to cascading delays to their return home, culminating in a NASA decision to fold them into its crew rotation schedule and return them on a SpaceX craft this year.
On Tuesday morning, Wilmore and Williams strapped inside their Crew Dragon spacecraft along with two other astronauts and undocked from the ISS at 1.05 a.m. ET (0505 GMT) to embark on a 17-hour trip to Earth.
The four-person crew, formally part of NASA's Crew-9 astronaut rotation mission, plunged through Earth's atmosphere, using its heatshield and two sets of parachutes to slow its orbital speed of 17,000 mph (27,359 kph) to a soft 17 mph at splashdown, which occurred at 5:57 p.m. ET some 50 miles off Florida's Gulf Coast under clear skies.
"What a ride," NASA astronaut Nick Hague, the Crew-9 mission commander inside the Dragon capsule, told mission control moments after splashing down. "I see a capsule full of grins, ear to ear."
The astronauts will be flown on a NASA plane to their crew quarters at the space agency's Johnson Space Center in Houston for a few days of routine health checks before NASA flight surgeons say they can go home to their families.
"They will get some well-deserved time off, well-deserved time with their families," NASA's Commercial Crew Program chief Steve Stich told reporters after the splashdown. "It's been a long time for them."
POLITICAL SPECTACLE
The mission captured the attention of US President Donald Trump, who upon taking office in January called for a quicker return of Wilmore and Williams and alleged, without evidence, that former President Joe Biden "abandoned" them on the ISS for political reasons.
NASA acted on Trump's demand by moving Crew-9's replacement mission up sooner, the agency's ISS chief Joel Montalbano said Tuesday. The agency had swapped a delayed SpaceX capsule for one that would be ready sooner and sped through its methodical safety review process to heed the president's call.
Trump told Fox News on Tuesday that Wilmore and Williams will visit the Oval Office after they recover from their mission.
Wilmore earlier this month told reporters on a call from the ISS that he did not believe NASA's decision to keep them on the ISS until Crew-10's arrival had been affected by politics under the Biden administration.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, a close adviser to Trump, had echoed Trump's call for an earlier return, adding the Biden administration spurned a SpaceX offer to provide a dedicated Dragon rescue mission last year.
NASA officials have said the two astronauts had to remain on the ISS to maintain adequate staffing levels and it did not have the budget or the operational need to send a dedicated rescue spacecraft. Crew Dragon flights cost between $100 million to $150 million.
Crew Dragon is the only US spacecraft capable of flying people in orbit. Boeing had hoped Starliner would compete with the SpaceX capsule before the mission with Wilmore and Williams threw its development future into uncertainty.
Stich said on Tuesday that Starliner might need to fly another uncrewed flight - which would be its third such mission and fourth test overall - before it routinely carries US astronauts.
Boeing, which congratulated the astronauts' return on X, did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
286 DAYS IN SPACE
The ISS, about 254 miles in altitude, is a football field-sized research lab that has been housed continuously by international crews of astronauts for nearly 25 years, a key platform of science diplomacy managed primarily by the US and Russia.
Swept up in NASA's routine astronaut rotation schedule, Wilmore and Williams worked on roughly 150 science experiments aboard the station until their replacement crew launched last week.
The pair logged 286 days in space on the mission - longer than the average six-month ISS mission length, but far short of US record holder Frank Rubio, whose 371 days in space ending in 2023 were the unexpected result of a coolant leak on a Russian spacecraft.
Living in space for months can affect the human body in multiple ways, from muscle atrophy to possible vision impairment.
Williams, capping her third spaceflight, has tallied 608 cumulative days in space, the second most for any US astronaut after Peggy Whitson's 675 days. Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko set the world record last year at 878 cumulative days.
"We came prepared to stay long, even though we planned to stay short," Wilmore told reporters from space earlier this month.
"That's what your nation's human spaceflight program's all about," he said. "Planning for unknown, unexpected contingencies. And we did that."