Category Archives: argentina

Hot off the Press (the other kind of press)

The online magazine, eGFI, a publication of the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE), has just published a story about our collaboration with RISD. Take a look.
http://students.egfi-k12.org/waste-for-life-making-trash-useful/

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Survival Architecture

Responding to emergency needs in the wake of recent disasters in Haiti and Chile, Carlos Levinton and his group at the CEP (Centro Experimental de la Produccion) have been developing architectural + social models that address the ecological and economic disruptions which disproportionately affect society’s poorest members. His Tire House is an example of CEP [...]

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WFL Needs and Feasibility Book

Caroline, Eric, Thimothy, and Emily have just published a book about Waste for Life and the methodology we have honed during the past four years. From the introduction: Engineers can help make the world a better place. We can provide better access to water, health, food, shelter, education and warmth, and we have the potential [...]

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Closing the Circle

Shortly after arriving in Buenos Aires in June 2007, we visited Carlos Perini at the Cooperativa de Trabajo Avellaneda Limitada (http://wasteforlife.org/?p=19). Technically, this is not a cartonero cooperative, but is instead a sort of low level middleman, buying recyclables off of cartoneros in the Dock Sur area, which they sort, process, and sell up the [...]

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The Third Side of a Coin

Any doubts we harbored that it was back to business as usual in Buenos Aires were quickly dispelled during the past week. The volatile mixture of garbage, recycling, cartoneros, local government, national government, private enterprise, and the Zero Garbage Law have been cunningly politicized by all parties way beyond what we encountered before we left [...]

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Trash Has Crashed

The NY Times published a December 7th article titled Back at Junk Value, Recyclables Are Piling Up, which confirms what we’ve been learning here. The market for recyclables is drying up, and prices have declined precipitously. We don’t know yet the extent of damage being done to the cartoneros on the street or within the [...]

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It Works

We worked most of Tuesday with university electricians to rewire the hotpress so that it wouldn’t continually shut down the electrical circuits in the FADU basement, outside of the CEP, where it is now located. By Wednesday morning the electrical work was finished, and a safety control box was fitted to the machine that would [...]

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Very Hot (pressing)

About 2 weeks before arriving in Buenos Aires, we arranged with Carlos Levinton to move the hotpress from INTI, where it had languished this past year, to his Center for Experimental Production (CEP) at the University of Bs.As. We wanted to maximize the short time we had here and work with Carlos’ group to begin [...]

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Back in Buenos Aires

We’ve been quiet on these pages for almost one year – the time that has passed since we left BsAs and returned to North America – but this doesn’t mean that we’ve been quiet. Much and little has happened in the interim between December 2007 and December 2008. Caroline and I have spoken frequently about [...]

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Who’s Doing What?

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, [...]

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