Waste for Life has two ongoing projects in Lesotho and Argentina. We have many collaborators in both countries, but the ultimate beneficiaries of our work are the cooperative members (from the Maseru Aloe Multipurpose Cooperative Union in Lesotho and the cartonero cooperatives Argentina) who we have worked alongside since 2006.
Argentina
Angeles Estrada Vigil and Mariana Massigoge teach in the Industrial Design department at the University of Buenos Aires and have taken the lead outside support roles for the Cooperativa Nueva Mente project, helping to build a manufacturing stream into the coop’s day-to-day recycling activities. Graciela Pasetti, former President of the cooperative, is the internal coordinator of the project, and her efforts are supported by Maria Virginia Pimentel and the group, Abuela Naturaleza, which provides guidance to the cooperative and linkages to the offices and services of the local municipality.
We commissioned our first production hotpress from the Cooperativa de trabajo 19 de diciembre, and it is now on site at Cooperativa Neuva Menta in Móron, a municipality of Buenos Aires. A second hotpress has been built by 19 de diciembre for Carlos Levinton’s group at the University of Buenos Aires, the Centro Experimental para la Producción. which has been an ally and research partner of ours since 2007.
Lesotho
Thimothy Thamae coordinated the efforts in Lesotho from his base in Kingston, Ontario but has returned to Lesotho to take up a professorship at the National University and lead our project with the Maseru Aloe Multi-Purpose Cooperative Union. This has been fully funded by the United Nations Development Project. Click here for his executive summary of the project. Thimothy and Caroline Baillie’s work with this cooperative in the summer of 2006 was the antecedent of Waste for Life.