In an enormous warehouse filled floor to ceiling with plastic, glass and newspapers, Sara Samaniego lip-synchs to a rap song, dressed in her trademark blue jumpsuit and braids.
Samaniego, 32, is filming a video for the hundreds of thousands of followers she has amassed across Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. She has won international awards, collaborated with celebrities and regularly gets stopped on the streets for photographs.
The topic that has earned her so much popularity? Recycling.
Through her colorful aesthetic and peppy persona, Samaniego brands herself as Latin America’s first recycling influencer, attracting a passionate fan base in Colombia’s capital, Bogota, by educating followers on how to clean and sort their garbage through her character, Marce the Recycler.
Her work has also drawn attention to the often-overlooked community of informal recyclers who eke out a living redeeming recyclables.
Bogota, like many cities in the developing world, has no government service for collecting items on a set schedule. Instead, it relies on about 26,000 informal recyclers, according to Consuelo Ordóñez, director of the city’s public utilities authority.
Families traverse streets digging through garbage left outside homes and businesses, searching for glass, cardboard and plastic. They load recyclables onto huge wheeled carts that they drag by hand to recycling organizations or private warehouses where they redeem their haul. The waste is eventually converted back into raw materials and made into new products.
It is grueling, backbreaking work that earns about $35 a week — half the country’s minimum wage.
Samaniego’s widely seen videos have helped recyclers avoid a time-consuming step by encouraging viewers to clean items properly so that more can be redeemed.
“The majority with whom I have spoken, they are mothers, heads of families, fathers,” Samaniego said. “They make an effort every day and work really hard.”
Many of her videos seek to humanize a class of workers that is largely invisible or looked upon with disdain.
One video features recyclers talking about common assumptions people make about them.
“People think I am going to rob them,” a woman says.
“People think I use drugs,” a man says.
In the video, Samaniego invites viewers to get to know the “honest and dignified” work of recyclers.
She has also tried to use her renown to provide financial aid.
During the coronavirus pandemic, Samaniego raised funds to donate food to informal recyclers, an experience that led her to create a nonprofit, Recycling Love, which helps provide health care and other services.
Milena Cantor, 46, has been a recycler since she was 8 and is proud of work she believes helps the environment, despite the hurdles to putting food on the table for her three children.
She is grateful to Samaniego, she said, for educating Colombians about proper recycling.
When her son suffered an injury that caused him to have seizures, Cantor said Samaniego released a video to raise funds for his medications.
“Marce is a very special girl,” she said. “She has helped the recyclers a lot.”
Samaniego’s interest in recycling started as a child.
She grew up in the northern suburbs of Bogota but spent a lot of time in a rural area about a five-hour drive from the capital, where her mother was from. Her father died when she was a baby, and her mother rented out property in the rural area to put her four daughters through school.
During vacations in the countryside, there would be no garbage collection, so Samaniego’s family would burn their trash — a common practice in many developing countries.
The black smoke wafting up into the air always shocked her. “I didn’t know much,” she said, “but I did think that this must be bad.”
Years later, while studying communications at a private university in Bogota, she had to make a documentary for a class and decided to focus on garbage.
That is how she learned about the informal recyclers and their struggles.
“This changed my perspective and showed me a reality that I didn’t know about,” she said. “I wanted to show that reality to the world.”
After graduation, she started a digital marketing agency and would often chat with recyclers outside her office, asking them how she should wash and sort materials for them.
One day, she said, she was watching a viral video on YouTube thinking to herself that “people watch a lot of garbage” on social media. She happened to be looking out her window, Samaniego said, and saw a recycler rifling through the trash.
It was her eureka moment.
“The two ideas came together,” she said. “We need a YouTuber recycler!”
Her first thought was to find a recycler to appear in videos she would make.
But when she tried to approach potential subjects, she found many were distrustful, did not like cameras or were too busy to commit.
Next, she put out a casting call for actors. But when she instructed them during auditions to play a recycler, many leaned into ugly stereotypes and played a drug addict. Eventually, a friend told her, “Sara, the person you are looking for is yourself.”
She dedicated herself to researching her new role. For three months, she accompanied recyclers on their routes, peppering them with questions.
So was born the cheerful character of Marcela, or Marce, complete with a backstory modeled off the people she had spent time with. Marce has been a recycler since she was a little girl, just like her parents. She lives with her boyfriend, Hernando. She is friendly, family-oriented and hardworking.
On May 13, 2019, Samaniego uploaded her first video, teaching viewers which items to put in white trash bags (recyclables) and which to put in black ones (nonrecyclables). Her account quickly took off, and soon she was fielding calls from local media outlets.
But many followers did not realize that Marce was a character — they thought Samaniego was an actual recycler. At the time, she would paint her teeth to make them look rotted and wear “torn, dirty clothes.” She stopped doing that.
“I wanted to make a character that would have an impact, that would raise awareness,” Samaniego said. “It wasn’t like a strategy of deception, but a strategy of putting yourself in another person’s shoes.”
The woman behind Marce lives in the northern suburbs of Bogota, where her studio-attic features walls decorated with recycled newspaper and plastic bottles. She chooses from a rack of jumpsuits, weaves her long hair into braids and puts on a backward baseball cap and earrings made of soda can tabs.
On a recent day in September, she transformed from a poised and professional digital marketer into the spirited goofy recycler. She broke into a big smile and spoke with a playfulness and childlike glee.
At the warehouse where Samaniego was filming her video, Blanca Usa, 57, was cutting the wrappers off plastic bottles. She has worked there sorting recyclables for nine years.
Items arrive much cleaner than they once did, an improvement that she attributes to Samaniego.
Gina Villabon, a teacher in La Cascada, a rural town about 200 miles south of Bogota, discovered Marce during the pandemic when she was looking for ways to engage with her students virtually for a unit on the environment.
“She was our inspiration,” Villabon said. “The children know the color code very well, and at home, they are making an effort to separate the garbage.”
“And we have learned that from Marce,” she added.
Published in The New York Times The New York Times on 11 November, 2024.