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.



Record 2024 Temperatures Accelerate Ice Loss, Rise in Sea Levels, UN Weather Body Says 

New York University student researchers sit on a rock overlooking the Helheim glacier in Greenland, Aug. 16, 2019. (AP)
New York University student researchers sit on a rock overlooking the Helheim glacier in Greenland, Aug. 16, 2019. (AP)
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Record 2024 Temperatures Accelerate Ice Loss, Rise in Sea Levels, UN Weather Body Says 

New York University student researchers sit on a rock overlooking the Helheim glacier in Greenland, Aug. 16, 2019. (AP)
New York University student researchers sit on a rock overlooking the Helheim glacier in Greenland, Aug. 16, 2019. (AP)

Record greenhouse gas levels helped bring temperatures to an all-time high in 2024, accelerating glacier and sea ice loss, raising sea levels and edging the world closer to a key warming threshold, the UN weather body said on Wednesday.

Annual average mean temperatures stood at 1.55 degrees Celsius (2.79 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels last year, surpassing the previous 2023 record by 0.1C, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said in its annual climate report.

Countries agreed in the 2015 Paris Agreement to strive to limit temperature increases to within 1.5C above the 1850-1900 average.

Preliminary estimates put the current long-term average increase at between 1.34-1.41C, closing in on but not yet exceeding the Paris threshold, the WMO said.

"One thing to point out very clearly is that one single year above 1.5 degrees doesn't mean that the level mentioned in the Paris agreement had been formally exceeded," said John Kennedy, WMO's scientific coordinator and lead author of the report.

But uncertainty ranges in the data mean that it cannot be ruled out, he said during a briefing.

The report said other factors could also have driven global temperature rises last year, including changes in the solar cycle, a massive volcanic eruption and a decrease in cooling aerosols.

While a small number of regions saw temperatures fall, extreme weather wreaked havoc across the globe, with droughts causing food shortages and floods and wildfires forcing the displacement of 800,000 people, the highest since records began in 2008.

Ocean heat also reached its highest on record and the rate of warming is accelerating, with rising ocean CO2 concentrations also driving up acidification levels.

Glaciers and sea ice continued to melt at a rapid rate, which in turn pushed sea levels to a new high. From 2015 to 2024, sea levels have risen by an average of 4.7 millimeters a year, compared to 2.1mm from 1993 to 2002, WMO data showed.

Kennedy also warned of the long-term implications of melting ice in Arctic and Antarctic regions.

"Changes in those regions potentially can affect the kind of overall circulation of the oceans, which affect climate around the world," he said. "What happens in the poles doesn't necessarily stay at the poles."