Grupo Empresarial de Economía Circular Gaia Vitare was born in 1999 with the objective of managing electrical and electronic waste (E-WASTE) from companies. Iván Gómez, together with some fellow students, received a donation of technological waste from an electronic equipment maintenance and repair company. With this e- waste, he began research on the classification and use of the different materials that were present in the waste. His co-workers decided to leave the company and since October 2001 he continued in the company of Aura Milena Melo, with whom he redefined the value proposition as a company of integral management of technological waste. GEEC Gaia Vitare is a pioneer in this area in Colombia and little by little has been winning thousands of clients and has promoted a workforce that is well prepared in this area. 

The company adapted to the requirements of Departamento técnico Administrativo del Medio Ambiente DAMA and the legislation of that time. Adapting one of the first cellars where they have been operating since 2003 and taking advantage of opportunities, they have created new business models, such as collection points for individuals, joint work with post consumption, customers, research entities, universities and multilateral support institutions. By that same year they had simple disassembly processes and acquired their first truck for the proper transportation of the waste being processed in the facilities; the objective since then has been to work hard to achieve increasingly industrialized plants and in pursuit of this mission more than twelve years ago, they began the search for investors to channel capital and after evaluating contacts from Mexico, Canada, Switzerland and Colombia, they managed to finalize an investment agreement that allowed in 2013 to make a significant expansion of its installed and operational capacity.

In 2014, the company started to look for suppliers in Europe and was able to import state-of-the-art equipment and machinery for process optimization. In 2016, due to the death of one of its founding partners, Aura Milena Melo, the company underwent a reorganization and redistribution of roles and functions. Subsequently in 2020 – 2021 the company faced the pandemic generated by COVID-19 which allowed it to redesign and expand its value proposition to offer even more innovative solutions in the materials resulting from the management and use of waste, counting by early 2022 with a fairly complete plastics and polymers laboratory.

In 2022 the company suffered a fire in a part of its production plant in Bogota; thank God without any impact on human life, which led to the redesign in the city of Bogota of its entire infrastructure, processes, machinery and equipment in order to have safer and more efficient operations that allow it to continue being a benchmark for innovation, resilience and adaptation in the waste management industry. Currently, the business models are being redesigned in each of its lines to consolidate a competitive business group that allows customers to have the solution to their needs under the same channel, with improvements in logistics and in the response times they demand.