Refuse pickers give new life to Rio Carnival trash

RIO DE JANEIRO -- Elaine da Silva Moraes clambers up mounds of abandoned fabric, foam and feathers that minutes earlier were the essence of Rio de Janeiro's glitzy, multimillion dollar Carnival parades.

The creative costumes on display at the all-night Sambadrome parades that ended early Tuesday have made Rio's Carnival celebration the most famous in the world. But the handmade confections often have a short shelf life.

As the tens of thousands of revelers stream out of the Sambadrome, a surprising number of them abandon their costumes, leaving them strewn on the ground amid a sea of empty beer cans, crushed water bottles and other trash.

Enter Moraes, a "catadora," or trash picker, and hundreds of others like her, for whom Carnival represents an annual boon. Dressed in a patchwork of costume parts rescued from the detritus, Moraes filled plastic garbage bags with her treasures -- feathers, props, headgear and costly fabrics she re-sells or transforms into new costumes or clothing.

The catadores, who include small children, work swiftly to keep ahead of the crews of garbage men in orange jump-suits who pitch the piles of costumes and props into trash-compacting trucks.

"I think they're crazy," said Moraes, brandishing a limp plastic sword at the throngs of sweaty revelers as they poured out of the Sambadrome and stripped out of their oversize costumes. "They're literally throwing money away. I wouldn't dream of throwing money away the way they do."

Each of the 12 top-tier Samba schools pours at least $3 million annually into over-the-top floats and costumes. The schools receive funding from the state and city governments, from television rights and ticket sales, as well as private sponsors. The O Dia newspaper recently estimated the top schools invested a total of about $42 million in this year's parade.

The schools often provide free costumes for members who hail from the city's slums, but tourists can buy the right to participate in the parades by buying a costume, which start at several hundred dollars each, a way for the schools to raise even more cash.

During Carnival, Moraes and two of her four children sleep outside the Sambadrome, collecting dozens of trash bags full of rescued items she pays a trucker $50 to haul back to her home in the impoverished suburb of Duque de Caxias. She spends much of the rest of the year selling her finds to small samba schools from throughout Brazil and repurposing the bulky, sometimes surreal-looking Carnival costumes into more conventional disguises for parties and other Brazilian holidays.

Jose Luiz de Jesus, on the other hand, hunts for treasures for himself.

The 42-year-old is a trapeze artist who performs on the streets of Salvador, a colonial city 750 miles northeast of Rio. He's been making the more-than-daylong bus journey to Rio every Carnival for the past five years to collect extravagant looks for his act.

"I have a whole closet full of the amazing costumes I find here," said Jesus, adding the costumes have turned him into a minor celebrity in his native city. "I have so many now, my wardrobe looks like a movie star's."

His favorite finds this trip included a monkey suit in deep-pile polyester shag, a patriotic spandex leotard with stripes in the green and yellow hues of the Brazilian flag, and a lobster suit complete with oversized foam pincers and wiry antennae.

The catadores' eco-friendly ways have begun to catch on among the samba schools themselves.

Officials from Unidos da Tijuca, which closed this year's displays with a race car-themed parade early Tuesday morning, have said that as much as 25 percent of the school's materials are recycled or re-purposed. Plastic bottles, empty beer cans and old scraps of fabric are turned into floats, while the psychedelic-hued ostrich feathers that flood the Sambadrome parades are stripped off old costumes and used year after year.

Looking over her shoulder for security guards or police, 70-year-old Efigenia Beta Silva pulled a pair of scissors out of a pouch dangling from her neck and went to work snipping feathers off a gargantuan headdress that looked like something the Mad Hatter would have worn with gusto.

"They don't allow scissors here because they can be used as a knife," the retired day care assistant said as she stuffed her contraband tool back into its pouch and the wispy feathers into an oversized plastic bag. "But really, we're doing the world a favor by coming here and rescuing all these beautiful things from the garbage.

"It breaks my heart to see all the work and love and time and money that goes into these costumes go straight to the dump," she said.

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