People collecting and sorting garbage and selling them for recycling. Wikimedia Commons. Some rights reserved.
Norah Padilla embodies the difference between a strong woman by birth and a woman hardened by life. She experienced all the evils derived from extreme poverty and this tempered her humanity. She suffered the painful shortcomings of indigence and this deepened her understanding. She endured the most unfair inequalities and this made her become a crusader for the rule of law. Norah is one of the major Latin American referents of urban recyclers.
Her struggle began some years ago in Bogotá, where she organized a group of recyclers to demand their right to be recognised as public service providers, namely the urban waste recycling service. In 2012 the Colombian Constitutional Court, acting on the basis of an appeal filed by the recyclers, forced the government to set national standards for recyclers organized in cooperatives to take part in the bidding process for the household waste collection system.
