- In the heart of Rio de Janeiro’s Rocinha favela, the largest in Brazil, a chance discovery led a resident creating a project to turn improperly discarded cooking oil into sustainable soaps and cleaning products.
- Founded in 2020, the Óleo no Ponto initiative acquainted favela residents with environmental stewardship by creating eco-friendly detergents such as soap bars and dishwashing paste.
- In addition to preventing used oil from being dumped into water and clogging sewage pipes, the project empowers vulnerable women from Rocinha, who have found new sources of income by producing and selling detergents under the Sabão do Morro (Favela Soap) brand.
Rocinha, in the south of Rio de Janeiro, is, according to official data, the largest of Brazil’s more than 12,000 favelas, or inner-city communities. It has a population of just over 72,000, and the most occupied homes of any favela — more than 30,000.
Rocinha sprang up in the early 20th century, but its population really spiked from the 1950s onward, as people from other states across Brazil migrated to Rio de Janeiro in search of work. Over the years, as the favela expanded, its own economic and social structure took shape.
This has also made Rocinha fertile ground for local projects combining sustainability, social impact and community development. Many of them emerged “by chance,” says Marcelo Santos. Born and raised in the favela, the 43-year-old businessman and community leader says the idea that changed his life — and the surrounding area — took shape when he visited the Rocinha Sports Complex with local biology teacher Márcio Aroeira in 2020.
Together, they noticed a dense mass in one of the water reservoirs that flow toward the gym. Aroeira touched the fluid with his fingertips and quickly realized what it was: cooking oil residue, the result of improper disposal of household waste.
“He explained to me that it was a major environmental pollutant,” Santos says. “So I set out to understand the degree of oil contamination, the level of health damage, and the environmental issues [involved].”
Months later, after conducting research and connecting with professionals in the chemicals industry, Santos created the Óleo no Ponto project, a community initiative that encourages proper collection of used cooking oil from households. The project aims to process the oil into cleaning products, creating alternative sources of income, especially for local women living in socially vulnerable conditions.
The project is headquartered in an Integrated Center for Public Education (CIEP), a school complex in the heart of Rocinha. Here, Santos and his team run a small factory that takes in discarded oil and turns it into products that they sell on site.
Santos says improper disposal of cooking oil was “very common” before the project started. So an environmental reeducation program was needed, he says. It was also necessary to draw the attention of residents for the initiative to gain traction. With this in mind, Santos offered food baskets in exchange for 20 liters, or just over 5 gallons, of used cooking oil.
His initial goal was to prevent the oil from being poured down sinks, toilets, or even into regular garbage — a practice that causes enormous environmental damage. According to authorities in São Paulo, Brazil’s biggest metropolis, a single liter of oil can pollute up to 25,000 liters of water. They estimate that 100 million liters are improperly dumped down the drain every month throughout Brazil, increasing energy costs and consumption and worsening the climate crisis.
For Santos, in addition to the environmental impact, improper disposal often clogs pipes and storm drains, carrying pollutants into the ocean and compromising coastal areas such as São Conrado Beach, which has been contaminated by sewage from Rocinha for years. Santos says his advocacy alerted many residents to the importance of taking care of the environment, which was one of his main goals.
In 2021, the venture reached a turning point. Under a call for proposals published by the Rio de Janeiro Scientific Research Foundation (FAPERJ), the project received 350,000 reais (about $65,000) as an incentive for environmental projects combining technology, innovation and renewable energy in favelas. This money allowed Santos and his wife, Adriana Moura, who now heads the project, to invest in new research, skilled staff, new machinery, supplies, and other items for the company’s development.
This productive leap also spawned a new name: Sabão do Morro, Portuguese for “Favela Soap,” a brand that would become the face of the Santos family’s business model. Over time, the oil processed from Rocinha homes was transformed into dishwashing and laundry products, among other household items, sold as bars or paste — and even as detergent and disinfectant.
“Today, we are certified by the Regional Chemistry Council [CRQ],” Moura says. “Our target audience is women: we want to ‘give them a rod so they can catch their own fish.’”
She tells Mongabay that the women in the community attend a three-month workshop where they learn how to produce the eco-friendly cleaning material. “Many start working on the project and then go on to produce it themselves, reselling it elsewhere.”
A network of multiple benefits
In households across Rocinha, excess cooking oil that’s already been used to fry food is stored in plastic bottles. Under the Óleo no Ponto project, residents can deposit these bottles at dedicated collection centers. At the CIEP complex, the collection machine features a “social currency” system, handing out points that they can redeem for Sabão do Morro products.
“It’s excellent for the entire community,” says sales assistant Sueli Farias, pointing to the creation of new jobs and the improvement in the local sanitation system.
The collection machine can store up to 220 l (58 gal) of oil, and it’s been designed to be easy to use from the ground up. On a digital panel, residents enter their cellphone number and receive a text message with instructions on registration and accumulated points. The panel also displays information on the amount of oil collected, which then translates into the number of points awarded.
The machine then filters the oil, detecting potential elements that would make it unsuitable for making eco-friendly products. And there’s no way to game the system: if someone tried to top off a bottle with water to increase the volume, the machine would quickly identify the unwanted compounds.
For restaurants, bars and cafes that handle large amounts of fried food, the project provides barrels of up to 18 l (4.8 gal), which are collected as soon as they’re full and exchanged for an empty one, keeping the cycle going. “We have a huge range of businesses around here, mainly restaurants and fried food places,” Santos says.
Today, nine Rocinha residents take turns processing the cleaning products. The main ingredients besides the used oil are caustic soda, aromatic essences and sodium. It takes 5 l (1.3 gal) to churn out up to 23 bars of soap, according to the workers. These are then sold for around 2 reais each (about 35 U.S. cents), at stores located at the CIEP complex and in small local markets. The products are also advertised on social media, and residents can have them delivered.
According to Moura, the project turns out around 150 units of paste soap per week. The best-selling products include those used for washing dishes, driven by high demand from local businesses; Moura estimates they sell 1,200 units a month.
“We have customers who own restaurants in Rocinha. Sometimes they use 40 [units of dishwashing soap] a week,” she says.
The best seller, however, is the soap bar. Rocinha resident and longtime customer Dora Almeida tells Mongabay that she uses “the entire line” of products available.
“It’s a good idea because we’re preventing oil from going down the drain,” she says.
The quest to expand environmental solutions
With an eye on expanding their sustainability network, the project’s creators have established four key partnerships in recent months. The partners include two large hotels and two shopping malls in Rio de Janeiro. Due to their large infrastructure, each establishment has a container capable of storing up to 80 l (21 gal) of oil. Their participation in the network aligns with the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a topic dear to hotel chains that often tout their commitments to social and environmental initiatives throughout their service networks.
As a result of these new partnerships, the volume of collected oil is increasing. Between January 2024 and March 2025, before the hotel tie-up, Óleo no Ponto collected approximately 14,400 l (3,800 gal) of oil. Since April, when the hotel partnership began, the monthly average has increased by approximately 50%, reaching 1,800 l (476 gal) per month. With more oil to process into soaps and other products, there’s more income being generated for more women in the community: since last year, they’ve helped produce more than 5,000 items.
Adriana Moura, the project chief, has big plans for the future. She says she wants to get Sabão do Morro on the shelves of large supermarkets in the city.
“I’m not the one who will harvest this seed we are sowing. We’re trying to educate the next generations,” she says. “Children are the foundation. That’s why we insist on giving lectures [on sustainability] at schools.”
For environmental engineer Amanda Caroline Sousa, the project created in Rocinha provides significant environmental benefits, based on what she calls the three pillars of sustainability: social, economic and environmental.
“Promoting a solution for oil disposal also means putting into practice the principles of the National Solid Waste Policy, which is embedded in the concept of a circular economy,” she says. She adds this occurs “when waste is reincluded as a raw material in another production process — in this case, soap.”
The ongoing environmental transformation also benefits São Conrado Beach. When Rocinha’s pipes become clogged, waste can flow downhill during heavy storms, causing accidents on streets and roads near the favela. Today, according to Santos, the goal is to structurally change this situation. “By removing this oil from beaches, streets and drains, we also bring safety to people.”
From an almost serendipitous idea, Marcelo Santos has taken on the task of transforming a difficult issue into a solution: reducing the amount of environmentally harmful waste improperly discarded and creating opportunities for inclusion. His plans don’t stop there: he says he still dreams of more collection centers, ongoing training, support from environmental organizations, and new public policies. By following this path, he says, the impact of the small factory in the community education center could be amplified, enabling the creation of new products and bringing them to other parts of Rio de Janeiro, where sustainability and economic empowerment would also be very welcome.
Banner image: Aerial view of the Rocinha favela. Image by Chensiyuan via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
This story was first published here in Portuguese on Oct. 10, 2025.
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