Legitimizing Trash Recycling in Argentina: Claiming Dignity, Safety and Economic Opportunity for Trash Recyclers in Buenos Aires

One of four persons in Argentina is unemployed in the wake of the nation's recent economic meltdown. Hundreds of people in Buenos Aires, the capital city, are trying to support themselves and their families by scavenging recyclable materials from the garbage. Scavenging, however, is a marginal, disreputable and unhealthy activity that is subject to police prosecution.

In Buenos Aires, trucks pick-the up garbage between the hours of 8 p.m. and midnight, so scavengers hit the streets in the evening despite the fact that scavenging is illegal. Lacking childcare, parents often take children with them - who may be too tired to attend school during the day as a result.

The El Ceibo Cooperative of Goods and Services for Recyclers was organized in 2000 to integrate this marginalized group into the labor force by bringing dignity and decent living standards to scavengers, and by legalizing their activities. It encourages use of the term "recycler" rather than scavenger ("cirujas") to promote self-esteem and a recognition that recyclers provide an important service to the community.

Turning Trash into Treasure

Disposing the growing amount of solid waste from Argentina's cities is an urgent problem. The Buenos Aires metropolitan area creates nearly two million tons of garbage annually, all of which is compacted and burned, or buried in landfill sites - creating soil, air and water pollution. Leaking bags of garbage contaminate and block drainages.

Argentina has no recycling program and thus does not separate organic, inorganic and dangerous wastes. Ironically, some of Argentina's waste paper and glass is exported to Brazil for recycling, and then sold back to Argentina. This creates an economic opportunity for freelance recyclers of paper, glass, metal, plastic, and household items in the Buenos Aires area where the annual waste stream includes some 117,000 tons of paper, 94,000 tons of plastic, 40,300 tons of glass, and 21,000 tons of metal.

Claiming Dignity, Safety and Value

But because recyclers have operated as unorganized individuals, they have been exploited by intermediaries and private companies that purchase recyclables at very low prices. Some private garbage dumps hire recyclers in exchange for a cart, and then oblige them to sell their pickings at low prices.

Caption: Buying metal at a storage shed

El Ceibo is working to make recycling clean, safe, dignified and economically viable. By taking out loans and raising revenues from recycling, it is giving recyclers access - for the first time - to equipment for handling trash, places to store collected refuse, competitive markets where they receive fair prices for their recyclables, and the necessary credit and information to organize their own recycling businesses.

Improving Quality of Life

Caption: Sorting aluminum cans in a shed

By organizing the recyclers, El Ciebo is commercializing the recycling businesses and creating competitive markets. It is using proceeds from a loan to build storage sheds throughout Buenos Aires where materials collected by El Ciebo members and other cooperatives can be stored until they command a good price. By eliminating intermediaries, members' income is boosted by about 50 percent.

By organizing the recyclers, El Ciebo is creating employment opportunities in a bleak economy where the jobless often cannot afford housing, healthcare or education. El Ciebo places special emphasis on finding jobs for young people who are otherwise idle and living on the streets.

Caption: Working in a collection shed

Boys aged 14 to 20 are given advanced training in environmental issues and management, solid waste treatment and public speaking. They act as environmental educators and advocates who are sent out to talk with families and businesses in their community. They receive identification credentials, a health certificate, a uniform and small payments and have been assigned zones and routes in the Palermo and Villa Crespo neighborhoods, now expanding into the Belgrano and Recoleta areas.

El Ciebo also promotes childhood education, better health, sanitation and nutrition, and family planning to help reduce poverty and marginalization among recyclers. Members are encouraged to give each other mutual aid, and to educate the larger community about healthy environmental practices and the benefits of separating wastes for recycling.

Life on the Streets

Beatriz Bustos (below, left) lives with five children in an abandoned house on Acevedo Street along land set aside for the AU3 highway that was never built. Her daughter Vanina is tall and thin, and Beatriz has enrolled her in dance lessons since she was a young child. Now Vanina is one of the few pupils in the National School of Dance. She is in her third year, and fortunately her mother has sold enough cans this year to pay at least a part of the cost of her $70 dancing shoes.

Caption: Beatriz Bustos (left) and Valentín Herrera (right)

"Who knows if I am ashamed?" Bustos says. "The point is that I learned to do this since I was a kid in the quema."

Quema is such an odd word here in the city that Bustos can't say it without telling the whole story. The quema was a large wasteland full of garbage where her parents took her and her sisters when she was six and lived in the Lomas de Zamora suburbs.

"At the end of the quema, we looked for metals, bones, and ceramics," Bustos says. She remembers the bones needed to be cleaned, and that a pen manufacturer paid her family a bit more when they boiled the bones to make them spotless. "No, they weren't dog bones," she recalls. "We looked for osobuco (a portion of a cow) bones. They were more plastic and useful."

Now Bustos is 50 years old. Since she lost her job two years ago, she has gone back to work with garbage, among the cans. "Yes, why not? I'm proud," she says. "You are your ship and your anchor at the same time."

Bustos has developed two specialties: gathering cans and fan engines. She is considered an expert in these fields by her companions. In winter, she walks between three and six miles per day because it takes perhaps ten blocks to find a couple of pounds of cans. In the summer, she can find this many cans (approximately 60) in two blocks.

She sells a couple of pounds of cans for 50 cents when she is by herself, or for one dollar when she manages to sell her cans with other companions. "For me, a can is a coin, no matter how much a coin is worth," she says. By the end of the day, her cans have paid for the shorts that Vanina wears at school.

"Hunger doesn't wait"

Valentín Herrera's bus is old. Herrera (photo above, right; and below) bought it used and uses it to pick up garbage in the street. But who, he asks, wants to say he does this for a living?

Caption: Herrera (center) works inside his bus with a friend and a couple of canine companions

"I don't steal. I don't drink. I do this for living. Who likes to ask for bread? But hunger doesn't wait," he says to the policemen who try to stop him, telling him his work is illegal. Herrera knows the streets and the rules of the game. He has a fixed route on Mondays through Saturdays. He sticks to it because giving up a route means losing the territory. "If you want to go back, you will have to pick up what it is left," he says.

This was the first lesson he learned, when he tried to drive his old Ford '56 into another person's territory. It was turf that belonged to "Fat" León. León had a profound understanding of the value of garbage: it is said that León now has six Mercedes and laborers who pick up cardboard in the best locations in the city, Herrera said.

León warned Valentín: "You can collect from the eighth district, down to there. Is that clear?" The seventh and downtown districts are forbidden zones for garbage collectors, but they can operate in the eighth district without restriction. The rules of the street are firm and effective.

"If it has been gathered up, you mustn't touch," Herrara says. He learned this code long ago, on one of his first days at work. He was checking garbage bags when he came across a huge pile of cardboard. There was nobody in sight and somebody had left a cap on the top – or so he thought. It didn't take long for Herrara to learn that nobody forgets a cap on the street: the cardboard already had an owner, and the cap made this clear.

Contacto:
Cristina Lescano
"El Ceibo" Cooperativa de Provisión de Bienes y Servicios para Recolectores.
Paraguay 4742, CP 1425
Buenos Aires
Argentina
Email: elceiborsu@yahoo.com.ar
Tel: +(5411)4899-0641.