The brazilian economy loses billions of reais every year because of a unedequate rate of recycling. While Brazil is the worldwide leader for recycling of aluminium cans with a recycling rate of more than 98%, the recycling rates of other household wastes tend towards zero. The high rate of aluminium recycling is only the result of the high value of aluminum scrap motivating people to collect and selling them.
Most of the time people don’t realize the importance of other recyclable materials like plastic and paper, but they also have value and can generate profit, because having little profit is better than having no profit at all.
A big problem is that most places don’t have the right guidance on how to segregate the materials and the households waste isn’t sufficient seperated to be recycled, only filled into waste disposal sites. It needs a change in mind of brazilian people and a change in law to improve the seperating of the households waste. A concern about the waste of paper, plastic, metals and organic wastes seems to be essential. Only then recycling rates of paper and plastics could be increased because of less work on seperating the household wastes manually. This would end in less use of new raw materials and generating benefits for the brazilian economy with an amount of billions of reais a year.

Sources:
https://www.rioonwatch.org/?p=44480
https://global-recycling.info/archives/791