Closing the Circle

Shortly after arriving in Buenos Aires in June 2007, we visited Carlos Perini at the Cooperativa de Trabajo Avellaneda Limitada (https://www.wasteforlife.org/?p=19). Technically, this is not a cartonero cooperative, but is instead a sort of low level middleman, buying...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...