**4. Challenges of Guatemala City**

Although making compost from green market waste was one of key goals of the project reported in this chapter, it was really based on the foundational intention of creating future employment opportunities for the disenfranchised and poorly educated youth from the squat neighborhood in Zone 3. Perhaps if one of these goals could be accomplished—compost production—it would trigger the success of the other—future opportunities for the youth who had little future prospects. With this clear objective, the work aimed to explore how to achieve social sustainability. Minica and France (2008) postulated that social sustainability is in fact composed of the following four key objectives: 1. education and training; 2. promoting human health; 3. winning the fight against poverty; 4. creating a equitable and just working environment [36]. Yes, self-empowerment can be achieved through education, however with only 69.1% of the population in Guatemala who can read and write, it is perhaps the most illiterate nation in Central America. Similarly, 8 out of 10 people will never graduate from high school, not because they are lazy or lack ambition but because they must leave school while they are still kids to find work in support of

**Figure 5.** *Approximately 80 percent of Guatemalans will never complete high school. This is particularly acute in Zone 3.*

their family (**Figure 5**). Finding jobs for this age group from Zone 3 is very difficult due to their insufficient education [37]. Thus, as mentioned above, the key research initiative of this work determined that the social pillar of sustainable development should be the most important because of the need to create opportunities for the future of the youth from Zone 3.

The CENMA fruit and vegetable market generates a huge amount of green waste each day as part of the trimming and packaging of the commodity for local and international markets. Not surprisingly, some 115 cubic meters (150 cubic yards) of organic waste is trucked daily to the landfill; yet it need not be. The head for Public Works of Guatemala City agreed to collaborate with the author and his graduate students from the University of Massachusetts, Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning, for a variety of reasons: technical knowhow and enthusiastic students with a strong adherence to environmental justice. The City agreed to a student-initiated start-up business to produce useable compost on a small tract of land situated immediately adjoining CENMA. The site was unfortunately very small, 0.48 hectares (1.2 acres), but it would allow the team to attempt to test the principles of CE and pillars of sustainability.

The Municipal Parks Department in Guatemala City were investing nearly \$300,000 USD each year to amend the soil on their land at the parks and landscaped planting beds. The director of Public Works agreed to the purchase of compost from the new startup business for their public-sector landscaping projects.
