**1. Introduction**

This chapter reports on the success and failure of making compost for soil amendment using green waste from a large fruit and vegetable market situated in Guatemala City, Central America. Perhaps the term "failure" is inappropriate and should be referred to as, "factors that contributed to limiting the intended success of a start-up business." For anyone who has initiated a new business, you are continuously faced with innumerable problems complicating its success—such as the availability of skilled labor, licensure, market dependability for your product, managing the costs for materials, adapting to unpredictable weather and climate, marketing or branding of your product, and 100 s of other variabilities beyond your control. Perhaps the more successful ventures are those who can remain flexible and adapt quickly to externalities. Starting a new business and managing it on a daily basis is not for the faint of heart, however if the passion for what you have intended to accomplish is great and if it can bring significant improvement for people, the environment, and local economies, then this alone is a measurement of success. The challenges and "failings" of this work are discussed in the Results and Discussion section of this chapter.

Yet, how does one measure success in a broader context and how does one know that their efforts were productive and effective? For this research project, creating change within the lives and future prospects of perhaps the most disadvantaged youth from one of the poorest neighborhoods in the capital city of a developing world nation—Guatemala City—became the key measurement of success.

Certainly, developing a successful business that embraced the principles of circular economy while not losing money and remaining solvent were equally important. However as stated above, achieving measurable social sustainability was the driver in defining success, perhaps even more so than simply being viable and achieving a measure of environmental and economic sustainability.

Guatemala is situated in the northern portion of Central America with the Pacific Ocean to the west and the Caribbean Sea to the east, with international borders of Mexico to the north, to the southeast Honduras and El Salvador, and Belize on its eastern frontier (**Figure 1**). The capital, Guatemala City, is centrally positioned in the southern portion of the country at 1500 meters in elevation (nearly 5000 feet). Thus, nighttime temperatures are moderately cool in the summer. This is in stark contrast to the very warm and humid climate of the eastern portion of

#### **Figure 1.**

*Guatemala situated in the northern portion of Central American shares borders with Mexico, Belize, Honduras and El Salvador (Guia Geografico).*

*Compost, Social Sustainability, and Circular Economy in Guatemala DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.100280*

the country, known as the Peten, home to Tikal and the Mayan Biosphere reserve. Guatemala City has a population of nearly 2.9 million residents with more than 4 million or greater migrating to the capital city during each business week from rural areas [1]. Many low-income people live within the city and are concentrated into 22 neighborhood and employment zones based upon social and economic class separation. Zone 3 is the most impoverished where squat housing has been constructed upon early remnants of the nearby landfill, referred to locally as the *basurero* (**Figure 2**). People who work in the *basurero*—not for a living wage but rather to pick through the unsorted trash for subsistence—have erected a neighborhood of shanty houses using concrete blocks and corrugated metal as construction materials [2]. Most of the inhabitants here are fixed or rather trapped in conditions best characterized as abject poverty. They mostly subsist upon trash from the city as it is dumped from garbage trucks (**Figure 3**). They pick through the trash to collect plastic and glass which they then turn in for cash at recycling facilities, perhaps discarded food to eat, or cast-off household items to use; no doubt this is a grim existence for their families [3]. Guatemala City experiences a rainy season that can last for up to five or six months (May through October). The rainy season can and does cause the unstable terrain at the landfill to collapse [4], literally swallowing the people who are sorting through the trash. It is a tragedy that their bodies are rarely recovered due to the high levels of methane gas generated from the organic waste. Further hazards come from the greenhouse gas released from the decomposing waste which can cause cancerous tumors. Many of these people who are picking through the trash have marginable options for receiving basic health care and their injuries go untreated.

The research reported in this chapter set out to establish if compost could be produced to amend the marginal soil in the City's parks and landscaped planting beds using green waste typically discarded from a large City-managed fruit and

**Figure 2.** *Dwellings have been constructed upon portions of a former landfill using concrete blocks and corrugated metal.*

#### **Figure 3.**

*Families sort the recently dumped trash from garbage trucks to gather recyclables, discarded household items and edible food.*

#### **Figure 4.**

*Trucks that deliver farm produce to the central market could be used to deliver compost back to the farm for soil enrichment.*

vegetable market known as CENMA. Diverting the additional organic waste from disposal in the landfill made logical sense; why throw away something that could be used to create something else of value? However, what was unknown were the challenges in using the organic waste to produce compost in this high altitude and temperately cool environment during the spring and summer months. In addition to selling the finished product locally, the research attempted to determine if the finished compost might have a regional market, meaning might there be a broader client for the newly prepared compost? Could the compost also be delivered to the farms who had originally grown the fruit and vegetables to be used for enrichment of their soil, employing the same trucks (**Figure 4**) that brought commodity to the market on their return trip?
