waste-for-life (basura-por-vida)

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Who’s Doing What?

Published by efeinblatt December 19th, 2007 in argentina, cartoneros, education and social justice and engineering and social justice. 1 Comment

Who’s doing what? How will Waste-for-Life BA sustain itself? The only thing we knew for certain before coming to Argentina was that our stay was finite. The time that separated our flight into and out of BA was 6 months; we knew very little else. It’s premature to map out what we’ve learned and done, and way too early to draw any conclusions, but one thing we can point to is that we’ve adhered to our idea of Waste-for-Life as a loosely joined network of people with diverse competencies, sharing common values, who join together to work through poverty-reducing solutions to particular ecological problems. We had no a priori idea what form this would take, but this is what the decentralized structure looks like to us as we prepare to leave.

INTI is taking care of the science. They will spend the next few months putting the hotpress through its paces using different types of plastic waste in combination with cardboard and other natural fibers that they will collect from the cartonero cooperatives. They will test the results for compliance with local building codes and standards and will work alongside the cooperatives to teach them how to make the reinforced plastic composites. Levinton’s CEP group will be the experimenters. Once INTI has nailed down the technical processes, CEP will begin product development with their own hotpress, seeing what useful and/or fanciful products they can tease out of it. They too will work closely with the cooperatives, receiving and testing out their ideas and helping their members with production. Avina is waiting in the shadows for one of the cooperatives they work with to propose a manufacturing and distribution plan that they can support with their funding and facilitation resources, and it is very likely that they will be behind the first complete test case. The Working World (La Base) will help identify and work with the cooperatives which have the most likely chance of developing a successful manufacturing channel, and will establish and administer a revolving hotpress loan fund to enable the cooperatives to purchase a hotpress. And the cooperatives will be the innovators, the inspired ones, for they are filled with people who have hope, who struggle every day, who work so hard with so very little, yet can stand on their own shoulders and see beyond what they do now into a future where they deserve and will have a little bit more.

Handing it Over

Published by efeinblatt December 19th, 2007 in argentina, cartoneros, education and social justice and engineering and social justice. 0 Comments

In a few hours we’re off to INTI to participate in what is surely our final Waste-for-Life meeting before leaving Buenos Aires. We’ve already begun saying goodbye to our many compañeros, a word that after 6 months of learning and struggling here has real meaning for us and is not at all embarrassing to use. And though this may be our last meeting, it is really a first because we are bringing together in one place all of the players who will keep Waste-for-Life BA alive after we return to North America - representatives of the 9 cooperatives we’ve worked with since July 2007; Carlos Levinton from the University of Buenos Aires’ CEP; Gonzalo Roque from the Swiss NGO Avina, and Patricia Eisenberg’s INTI plastics group. (The only person who can’t make it today is Esteban Magnani from the micro-credit organization The Working World (La Base), who we met with yesterday and proposed a collaboration scenario which he enthusiastically endorsed.)

We’ve just returned from the INTI meeting, and the collective engagement, commitment and emotion caught us pretty much off guard. We had clearly handed over Waste-for-Life to the local stakeholders and could feel OK about going home. There was a single moment in that research laboratory, amidst the hotpress and all of the other grayish green testing equipment, and all those people who had such different stories to tell, but each of whom had been drastically affected in one way or another by the last decade of Argentinean history, when it became crystal clear why we were here doing what we were doing. Adam Guevara talked about what he had learned from the INTI scientists and how it had changed the life, yes, the lives of the 20+ members of Renacer Lanzone, the civic association that he runs. These people collect and separate and sort plastic, which is a stinking job, and a couple of INTI scientists from Patricia’s plastics group had spent time with them, some time ago, teaching the group how to do their job better by being more precise in their classifications and, thus, in their separation and sorting processes. Adam’s group, whose members come from the shantytowns across the highway from the huge CEAMSE dump, took these lessons seriously, and now are able to sell their plastic for 2-4 times as much money as any other recycling group we’ve met. It was Adam’s first opportunity to thank the INTI scientists, which he did with great dignity, and which sent some of them out of the room in embarrassed, unexpected tears.

Champagne!

Published by efeinblatt December 16th, 2007 in argentina, engineering and social justice and hotpress. 1 Comment

Tomas delivered the Kingston Hotpress to INTI on Thursday as scheduled, and after about 2 hours of fiddling around with the electrical installation, we had a go of it with the strips of plastic bag that Caroline had been cutting up all morning - a task that was as much a necessity as occupational therapy seeing that we were all sitting around on the edges of our seats. The hotpress had never been road tested - it only worked theoretically according to Darko’s calculations and ingenious SolidWorks design. This was a lean and mean machine and, in order to keep the costs down, had no gauges (gadgets) to let us know that it actually generated enough heat (160°C) and enough pressure to melt the plastic. From my non-scientific mind’s perspective (after all, this was only the second time I had ever been in a research laboratory) the first test was a disaster. We were all much too impatient and didn’t let the press heat up enough - we expected this would take about 20 minutes, but only gave it 10 - and didn’t leave the plastic in the press long enough - we thought this would take about 15 minutes, but only gave it 7. We cooled the mold down with water and opened it to a soppy, un-melted plastic mess. Our faces were all frowns. At this point, Patricia Eisenberg leaned over to us and said, ‘don’t worry, we’ll make it work,’ and her INTI crew stepped in, inserted a funny little L-shaped thermometer into a gap in the press, declared that it was indeed hot enough to melt plastic, poured a bucket of polyethylene pellets over the few strips of plastic bag that remained in the mold, spread the pellets out evenly (kind of) over the 60cmx60cm surface, and shoved the mold back into the press. Tomas pumped up the car jacked that created the pressure, and I was the timekeeper. 15 minutes later, Tomas released the jack’s pressure, and we took the mold out of the press, laid it on the sidewalk just outside the building’s side door, hosed it down, and opened the mold to reveal a slightly rough around the edges but beautifully hardened 2 kilo plastic plaque. The hotpress worked, just as Caroline had always believed, said, knew it would, and we’ve invited members from the 9 cooperatives we’ve workied with during the past 6 months to come by INTI on Wednesday to see it in action. Six months after arriving in BA, it’s time for champagne!

Sin Patrón.

Published by efeinblatt December 12th, 2007 in argentina and cartoneros. 0 Comments

While waiting for the final tweaks to the hotpress - by the way, Tomas has tweaked it and is delivering it to INTI this Thursday, December 13 - the remarkable Erika Loritz has helped us conduct street interviews with cartoneros. (I met Erika in October on a side trip to Iruya in Northwest Argentina where she was studying the impact of tourism on indigenous communities. Her in situ mentor was Victor Bretscher whose Finca Potrero cultural ecotourism project had received World Bank Indigenous Community Development funds http://www.fincapotrero.org.ar/_english.html. Coincidently, I learned that Victor had previously worked in Lesotho’s Malealea Valley where I participated in a 2006 Theatre for Development Project. Lesotho, of course, is where Caroline began her work with local cooperatives and where, if we have to choose a place, the idea of Waste-for-Life began to germinate.)

We have spent most of our time in BA working with cartonero recycling cooperatives. They have the structures in place to successfully incorporate a small manufacturing channel to their mostly collection, sorting, processing and distribution operations. But equally important to us is a common political and social outlook that stresses equity and human interdependence, and we have been the privileged witnesses of these ideas in motion, particularly their commitment to wage equality, non-hierarchical participatory decision making practices, and to ’socializing’ their knowledge. We did not come to Buenos Aires to be community organizers, and so the individual or small family groups - the informal cartoneros who do much of BA’s recycling - have been, for the most part, a closed book to us. We realized early on that we were not hearing their voices, although we did hear many opinions about them from other people, but we didn’t have either the language skills or the confidence to simply go up to these people on the street and start talking. I spoke about this with Erika in Iruya, and she immediately offered to help us take up this challenge.

(cartoneros taking a special train into Buenos Aires on the Tigre line)

We have done 4 interviews so far and have others to do, so we are not working with a large dataset, however, there is a strong leitmotiv that we can point to, that we’ve been aware of ever since attending The Workers’ Economy: Self Management and the Distribution of Wealth conference in July, and that can be summed up with the phrase, ’sin patrón.’ This phrase, which means ‘without a boss’ or ‘without an overseer,’ gained currency during the recovered factory movement that began with the 2001 economic crisis, but we heard it used over and over again by the cartoneros we interviewed to describe the essential quality of their lives in very positive terms. They did not want to work for anyone, they did not want to be subject to the collective decision-making processes of a collective, they did not want to bother anyone, and they did not want to be bothered. It is still much too early to sum up the content of the interviews, and we have a lot of transcribing and thinking to do, and loads to read up on about informal work, but with Erika’s help we have a special opportunity to learn something about this previously unavailable population of urban recyclers.

Reciclando Sueños

Published by Rhiannon November 17th, 2007 in argentina and cartoneros. 0 Comments

On a rainy Thursday, October 11, I accompanied Caroline and Eric to the cooperative Reciclando Sueños located in La Matanza, the largest zone of the Province of Buenos Aires with about two million inhabitants. The cooperative, which has collected recyclable waste in the nearby middle class neighbourhood of Aldo Bonce since 2004, stood out in a big way from others that we have had contact with.

The cooperative is the epitome of do-it-yourselfism. It was very evident that the members of the cooperative had an extensive knowledge of the types of materials that they were working with, but this is knowledge attained through trail and error and collectivizing the knowledge learned from successes and failures. They’ve managed to build a few major and complicated machines to process - cut into small bits, wash, and dry - the recycled plastic that they collect. This is important because the more capacity the cooperatives have to process recycled materials, the less they are at the mercy of intermediaries and the more value they can extract from the material. Apart from the impressive machines made from scratch and salvage to cut, wash, and dry plastics, they’ve also developed an injector machine that melts and molds a certain kind of plastic and produces the base and handle for a painting tool, which they will be selling in the hardware stores of the neighborhood where they collect recyclables. This is an important development from many angles. Economically it serves the cooperative because they can get a much better price selling a finished product to retail stores than selling the raw material to industry. They also spoke about producing these tools as being important symbolically in the development of their relationship with the residents of Aldo Bonce, because they can show not only that they are providing an environmental service by ensuring that recyclable materials do not end up in the landfill, but they are using the materials collected from the residents to produce something useful that returns to the residents. The injector machine is essentially the same idea as Caroline and Eric’s hot press in terms of the function it serves for the cooperative; it’s just that it produces a different tool. Continue reading ‘Reciclando Sueños’

The Phoenix of Lanzone

Published by cbaillie October 26th, 2007 in argentina and cartoneros. 0 Comments

Renacer Lanzone or the Pheonix of the barrio Lazone is a social organisation run by Adam Guevara. Adam had an idea over twenty years ago, that CEAMSE should send the trucks to groups of cartoneros, before putting the garbage in the ground, so that they could take the recycling materials, and leave less waste to be buried. He tried with many different Presidents of CEAMSE but it was not until the present one agreed, over three years ago, that Adam was able to realise his dream and set up a social factory or sorting centre in Lanzone district. His project was so successful there are now four centres and four more planned on the CEAMSE site – some of which we had already seen. Adam’s group are very successful, he told us, because they have been trained by INTI - the same plastics group that we work with, to separate the plastic waste very well and to sell each type individually. They make a lot more money than the other groups as a result – up to 20 pesos an hour. Adam cares very much for his group and when I asked what criteria he had for choosing people to work there he told me it was on the basis of need – if they have more children etc. He even keeps a section of the factory as a store of PET bottles to become a Christmas bonus at the end of the year.

Training seems to be an important part of the success here. INTI training the technical selection process and also Suarez and Neumann, a consultant engineer, working for the University of Sarmiento and CEAMSE, training them in roles and responsibilities, team work and conflict resolution, the context, history of recycling and cartoneros as well as the more technical matters. Adam is very keen to move on with us and he seems to be an extremely innovative thinker. As wary as we are of CEAMSE, we would love to work with Adam’s Pheonix.

Pressing Ahead

Published by efeinblatt October 26th, 2007 in argentina. 0 Comments

There have been more than a few unsettling moments during the past 3 1/2 months. Most of them have to do with the recognition that we have round-trip tickets and will be leaving here, that we will be alright. But the people we work with and have grown so close to can’t really go anywhere, and their futures are much, much less certain. Perhaps the biggest drag on moving forward, the thing that has the potential to finally torpedo everything we’ve been doing here and turn Waste-for-Life into an academic exercise, has been the hotpress - or lack of a hotpress - which is the key mechanical technology we’re sharing with the recycling cooperatives. Getting the hotpress manufactured here (as well as in Canada) has been a major stumbling block, but yesterday we visited Tomas’ workshop, which was a 3 hour trip for us out of the city, and saw the pieces of the hotpress ready to be assembled. We expect that we can actually begin training sessions within the month.

Painting a Picture

Published by efeinblatt October 22nd, 2007 in argentina and cartoneros. 0 Comments

Every Sunday night in the Bronx, before going to sleep, I take a few bags of separated garbage that have been accumulating during the week and put them down on the sidewalk in front of my apartment - plastic, glass, cardboard. These bags are picked up sometime between midnight and 7 o’clock Monday morning by city garbage trucks and …. And what? Well, frankly, I have no clue what happens to my bags of garbage and, like most people, just assume that New York City somehow takes care of it all. My responsibility ends at the separation and putting out phase, which is about the only connection I have with the disposal of what I consume, a process that is for the most part completely invisible to me. Sometimes I see people sifting through the garbage looking for ‘returnables’ that they pile into their own bags or hijacked shopping carts and take to the nearest supermarket to get 5 cents on the bottle. I have no idea what this exchange represents in terms of their monthly economy, but I can’t help but recognize that some people are interrupting my ‘orderly’ chain of consumption and disposal, bringing it to the surface, and making a few pennies off of it. If you multiply this scenario thousands upon thousands of times, you get the picture of what recycling looks like in Buenos Aires, only in that city, it is rare than anyone separates anything …. except the cartoneros.

Continue reading ‘Painting a Picture’

Synchronicity

Published by cbaillie October 13th, 2007 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

It seems to me that the conversations we are having now with cooperatives about our project are more detailed and to the point than they were when we arrived. Of course, you will say, because you now know more about what you are doing. But in fact, I haven’t noticed that we present the project in any different manner, but more so that the cooperative members ask much more sophisticated and relevant questions now, as if it’s the fourth time we have been to see them, rather than the first. It’s as if the idea is in the air… Some of the details that have been discussed recently are absolutely key to the success of the work within any of the groups we hope to work with. Our intern Nils is creating a cost analysis template and many of the factors we have been researching for this were brought up in recent meetings, such as ‘how much electricity would the press use?’ ‘what could we sell the product for?’ ‘How long will a ceiling tile last?’ ‘Who would buy it?’. These conversations took place in our meetings today and yesterday in Cooperativa El Alamo and Reciclando Suenos, both very successful and active cooperatives working in the recycling business. Both groups have an incredible spirit and believe strongly that they are providing a service just as the garbage trucks are, so they see no reason why the trucking companies are paid huge sums of money and the cooperatives are paid nothing or small subsidies. Marcelo from Reciclando Suenos had a head on fight with the government about this at the recent conference we attended on recycling.

Reciclando Suenos is the first coop we have seen which has actually moved on to manufacturing from collecting, sorting and selling. They have an actual product – a painting sponge, the handle and backbone of which is made from recycled plastic. They chop, clean, dry and injection mould the plastic, and then assemble the parts, selling them for 1.10 pesos each to a local wholesaler. We were extremely impressed with their team, who were supported by weekly workshops run by local PhD anthropology students. After a long cold wait in a drafty warehouse full of bags of plastic, we were privileged to experience one of these workshops. It seemed to us to be a cross between a recovered workers assembly (although we have only heard about these) and a cooperative development workshop. Members were asked to discuss certain issues and topics, including a series of case studies, which led onto some incredible discussions such as ‘how should we distribute the benefits gained when someone is given an extra item by the neighbours such as a good pair of socks?’ Sebastian and Maria, who have been working with this cooperative for over three years, facilitated the discussions brilliantly.

Cooperativa El Alamo is to become one of the city’s Green points. We were shown around the future premises, currently damp and mosquito-ridden, and proudly told which room would be the sorting and which the compressing area. We were introduced to both groups by Gonzalo Roque of Avina foundation who took us to El Alamo today.

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