When the Poor Make a Living from the Waste of the Rich

Argentina, October 28, 2021. Accompanied by representatives of the cartonero movement and over 10,000 people, Juan Cabandié, environment minister, proposes a “Packaging and Social Inclusion Bill” in the Argentine parliament (Congreso de la Nación Argentina).

This bill aims to encourage the integration of cartoneros—poor individuals who rummage through garbage cans in wealthy neighborhoods to collect recyclable waste (paper, cardboard, plastic) and resell it in order to earn a survival income (Carré 2015)—into the waste-management chain, by charging companies that produce or distribute packaging in Argentina on the polluter-pays principle. On a national scale, the recovery of recyclable waste involves some 150,000 people, who collected 2,400,000 tonnes of materials in 2020, [1] 10% of whom have emerged from the informal sector by becoming members of a cooperative. Of these, over a third (5,500) work for the autonomous city of Buenos Aires, where organizations of cartoneros have been able to gain recognition for their activities and become established as part of the city’s public services (Carenzo and Sorroche 2021).

This bill also questions the role of the public, private and civil-society sectors in waste management, and more specifically the formalization processes of waste reclaimers in Latin America. Following on from articles that have described these ongoing processes in Peru, Colombia and Brazil (Durand and De Oliveira Neves 2019; Rateau and Tovar 2019), the aim of this paper is to shed light on the case of Buenos Aires, where cartoneros’ cooperatives have contributed to a shift from the coexistence of two opposing models (public management and informal self-management) to one of shared waste management (Durand 2012).

Garbage collection: between public management and self-management

In the 1990s, the Argentine government undertook structural reforms designed to combat inflation and allow the market to regulate itself. These reforms led to an acute crisis in 2001, plunging millions of Argentines into extreme poverty. The practice of urban salvaging then became widespread: part of the impoverished middle class joined the ranks of the cartoneros (Gorbán 2006; Perelman and Puricelli 2019).

Initially concentrated on landfills on the outskirts of the city, informal waste recovery activity gradually moved to the “center”, following landfill closures (Carré 2013). In 2003, some representatives of the cartoneros and environmental NGOs made joint demands to the government of the autonomous city of Buenos Aires (Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, or CABA). This was followed by an extensive consultation process involving private companies, city and provincial governments, representatives of the cartoneros and researchers, which led to the passing of a law (no. 992) recognizing the activity of urban reclaimers (Carré 2015).

Some twenty years later, three waste management models can be distinguished (Figure 1). The first is public management, in which the local government of Buenos Aires provides the service, relying on private companies (1). These companies transport the waste to the Norte III “environmental complex” on the outskirts of the city, where it is sorted mechanically and biologically and then landfilled.

The second model, that of self-management, has been set up by poor populations, who collect and resell recyclable waste or offer to dispose of waste from slum dwellers who have no access to public services (2). In the first case, they collect recyclable waste door-to-door from shopkeepers and residents of wealthy districts, or directly from garbage cans, and make their money by reselling the materials on the black market. In the second case, in the villas miserias, the shantytowns where no municipal trucks pass, all waste processing is based on self-management: reclaimers take care of all waste collection (recyclable or otherwise), earning their income directly from the inhabitants (Carré 2013).

The coexistence of these two models means that municipalities have to invest in infrastructure (landfills, mechanical-biological sorting centers, incinerators, etc.). This is why, faced with budgetary difficulties and public demands, Latin American cities are increasingly opting for “innovative” modes of shared management (3) (Durand and De Oliveira Neves 2019).

This shared management is a hybridization of the first two models. The specificity of the Buenos Aires case lies in the fact that the cartoneros have formalized their activity within cooperatives, which has enabled them to take charge of the collection, sorting and resale of recyclable waste while fighting politically to be recognized by the public authorities.

Public services and cartoneros’ cooperatives: shared management

Under pressure from trade unions [2] and environmental NGOs (such as Greenpeace), the legislative framework for waste management in the city of Buenos Aires has evolved. Specifically, three laws (from 2003, 2006, and 2007) have implemented “Integrated Urban Solid Waste Management” (Gestión Integrada de Residuos Sólidos Urbanos, or GIRSU), in a process of institutional recognition of the cartoneros, in order to coordinate their activities with those of public-sector operators (Carré 2015).

After a phase of recognition, the mobilization of the cartoneros in Buenos Aires led to a phase of integration, transforming their living and working conditions. In 2013, the municipality signed social management contracts with the 12 cartoneros’ cooperatives. For each of them, it allocated areas of the city for collection, infrastructure for processing (waste sorting plants – centros verdes) (Figure 2) and logistical support for transporting materials and people (Schamber and Tagliafico 2021).

By organizing themselves into cooperatives, they can pool the storage of recyclable waste in centros verdes obtained by cooperative representatives from the local government. In addition, the collectivization of sales enables them to negotiate directly with the last recycling industrialists, thereby increasing the resale price. The cooperative sets the variable income based on the quantity of waste collected per collector. Finally, cooperative members receive a fixed income financed by the City of Buenos Aires.

While living and working conditions are improved by the organization of work in a cooperative, we can assume that not all cartoneros necessarily wish to formalize their activity. For example, during a collection round, the driver of a Las Madreselvas truck, a former informal salvager, spoke of his nostalgia for the practice of urban salvaging: “I really miss the street and its treasures.” [3]

Today, around 5,500 cartoneros (figure 2) are members of cooperatives and therefore work in a more formalized framework, although this fringe represents only the emerging part of the phenomenon, which varies according to the country’s economic situation. Two decades after the 2001 crisis, a pattern (poverty, inflation and IMF debt) seems to be repeating itself, with 44% of people living below the poverty line in 2021. [4] According to one cooperative manager, [5], informal reclaiming is making a massive comeback as the country plunges back into economic crisis. What’s more, as Marie-Noëlle Carré (2015) has shown, cooperatives are not a homogeneous whole, and there are strategic and political divergences between “mega-cooperatives” and “family cooperatives”.

In terms of flows handled by cooperatives, all sorting plants (centros verdes) received 87,175 tonnes in 2018. This is equivalent to over 8% of the 1.07 million tonnes that the City of Buenos Aires sent to landfill. Schamber and Tagliafico (2021) demonstrated the material efficiency of cartoneros cooperatives by comparing this 8% figure with the maximum percentage (11.5%) that could be achieved by a conventional differentiated collection system based on studies of Buenos Aires’ waste quality; minus the social dimension. These volumes vary from one cooperative to another, as do the number of members and recovery practices between mega-cooperatives and more family-run cooperatives (Carré 2015). However, beyond their heterogeneity, the cooperatives have in common the implementation of the “environmental promoters” program.

Cartoneras: women working to protect the environment

During the formalization process, the cartoneros cooperatives succeeded in gaining recognition and funding to raise residents’ awareness of sorting at source. The informal practice of ringing residents’ doorbells to collect their recyclable waste has become a public service. Spurred on by Jackie Flores, [6], a figure in the cartoneros and cooperative union movement, the practice of door-to-door collection has become a program that offers an alternative to street collection for women cartoneras. [7] Accordingly, for the past 10 years, cartoneras have been involved in this program funded by the City of Buenos Aires and Argentina’s environment ministry.

There are currently around 60 of these “environmental promoters” (promotoras ambientales), from five different cooperatives. This profession, reserved for women who have practised informal recycling, consists of creating links between the cartoneros and local residents, janitors and shopkeepers. They work in schools to raise awareness of recycling and sorting at source. They conduct surveys of households and businesses to find out whether they sort their waste, how much recyclable waste they produce and whether they are already connected with a cartonero. This information is used to draw up reports on city areas and the types of waste produced per urban unit (collective housing, individual housing, shops, offices, public buildings...) so that the cooperatives can establish “a strategy or message” [8] tailored to these different urban areas.

To structure stable networks of recyclable waste deliveries, the environmental promoters make agreements with residents and businesses during their rounds: together they define the day and time when a cartonero, who has been introduced to them beforehand, will collect recyclable waste. The action of these women cartoneras thus leads to the recognition of the social and ecological role of the cooperatives through the creation of an interpersonal relationship between the residents and the cartoneros cooperatives.

For Perelman and Puricelli (2019), who followed cartoneros and environmental promoters as part of a 13-year ethnographic fieldwork (from 2002 to 2015), these everyday practices tend towards the production of an unequal urban order.

Towards a new public urban waste-management service?

The Buenos Aires experience shows that shared waste management, in place of the opposition between public management and self-management, has enabled the creation of a new urban public service that includes cartoneros cooperatives. These highly politicized cooperatives have succeeded in setting up programs to raise residents’ awareness of the need to sort waste at source, in order to improve the working conditions of the cartoneros.

Beyond the case of Buenos Aires, it is the question of the model’s replicability that is raised by this bill. As Carenzo and Sorroche (2021) explain, the “Buenos Aires system” can be seen not only as a public desire to “formalize” the practices of poor populations, but also as the exercise of active citizenship in the design and management of a public service. Can the presence of cartoneros in the management of a public service engender a “working-class circular economy”? This bill, despite having received a favorable opinion in the Chamber of Deputies’ environment and budget committees, was never dealt with in session, and must therefore start the parliamentary process all over again. If they succeed in getting it passed, the law will be a further step in the recognition of cartoneros representatives as major players in waste management policies, environmental protection and the reduction of inequalities.

Bibliography

• Carenzo, S. and Sorroche, S. 2021. “The Politics of Waste Picking. Reflections from the Upscaling of a Co-management Model for Recyclable Waste in Buenos Aires (Argentina)”, Géocarrefour, vol. 95, no. 1.
• Carré, M.-N. 2013. Gouverner la métropole par les déchets. Service urbain, action publique territoriale et écologie urbaine à Buenos Aires, PhD dissertation in geography and territorial planning, Université Paris‑3 Sorbonne Nouvelle.
• Carré, M.-N. 2015. “Gestion intégrée et valorisation des déchets à Buenos Aires (Argentine)”, in C. Cirelli and B. Florin (eds.), Sociétés urbaines et déchets. Éclairages internationaux, Tours: Presses Universitaires François-Rabelais.
• Durand, M. 2012. “La gestion des déchets dans une ville en développement : comment tirer profit des difficultés actuelles à Lima ?”, Flux, no. 87, pp. 18–28.
• Durand, M. and De Oliveira Neves, F. 2019. “L’intégration des cueilleurs de déchets latino-américains ou la création d’une nouvelle marge”, EchoGéo, no. 47.
• Gorbán, D. 2006. “Trabajo y cotidianeidad. El barrio como espacio de trabajo de los cartoneros del Tren Blanco”, Trabajo y Sociedad, vol. 7, no. 8, pp. 1–23.
• Perelman, M. and Puricelli, V. 2019. “Cartoneros y promotoras ambientales. Caminar, desigualdad y experiencias urbanas en el espacio público de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires”, in J. Marcús, J. A. Mansilla, M. Boy, S. Yanes and G. Aricó (eds.), La Ciudad mercancía. Turistificación, renovación urbana y políticas de control del espacio público, Buenos Aires: TeseoPress.
• Rateau, M. and Tovar, L. 2019. “[La formalisation des récupérateurs à Bogota et Lima : reconnaître, réguler puis intégrer ?→https://journals.openedition.org/echogeo/16562]”, EchoGéo, no. 47.
• Schamber, P. J. and Tagliafico, J. P. 2021. “El Sistema de Recolección Diferenciada en el territorio de la Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires: Características inéditas de la participación de cartoneros en la gestión de los residuos urbanos secos”, Laboreal, vol. 17, no. 2.