Category Archives: cartoneros

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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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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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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Handing it Over

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. [...]

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Sin Patrón.

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 [...]

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Reciclando Sueños

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 [...]

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