Community-Based Participatory Workshop on Recycling Construction and Demolition Waste for the Empowerment of Women and Low-Income Communities in Colombia

Abstract

This case study presents a community-based, integrated solution to mitigate the environmental impacts of construction and demolition waste (C&DW) as well as empower women and low-income communities in Colombia to find decent and safe work by gaining skills in extracting value from what is traditionally seen as waste. Utilizing a primarily qualitative, participatory mixed method approach to understand the neglected knowledge, expertise, and goals of a low-income community as well as the complex systems that shape their lives, this case study presents a humanitarian engineering project aimed at collaborating with women in low-income communities in Colombia to manage and extract value from C&DW. The objective of this investigation is to connect C&DW management, empowerment, and sustainable community development by utilizing a participatory, community-based workshop. This study is significant as it depicts an inclusive urban mining project with the aim of contributing to sustainable community development methods in community-based engineering projects. Furthermore, this study also contributes to the study of women’s empowerment approaches by demonstrating the use of contextually situated empowerment approaches. Ultimately, although not conclusive, this study is offered as an example of an inclusive urban mining, community-based project, with the hope that it may inform future efforts of this type and promote interdisciplinary collaboration aimed at C&DW management for the empowerment of communities.