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 Waste-for-Life in the US, Canada, Australia, and the UK. We’ve manged to excite people with the vision of the work we’ve been doing with our collaborators here in Argentina and have picked up many fellow travelers along the way. The depth and enthusiasm with which people have responded to our work has been heartening, as we envision ways to build out a virtual network connecting social justice activists to each other, to funders, and to projects. We always believed that Waste-for-Life could become a model for similar work in other parts of the world, and have received inquiries from as far afield as Rochester, NY, Nairobi, Kenya and Port-aux-Prince, Haiti. But it’s been difficult and frustrating to keep up with life on the ground in BsAs from afar. We left just as Macri was coming into power as mayor of Buenos Aires. The prognostications for the cartoneros were not good, but up until now we’ve been unable get a handle on what was really happening. Our most reliable contacts, those responsible for setting policies and supporting the cartoneros from within the DGPRU (Dirección General de Políticas de Reciclado Urbano), were either fired or left. We took this as a portent of things to come.
Anne Geib, a researcher from Copenhagen, has been our best source of information. She originally contacted us last March because she, like us, was working at the intersection of waste and poverty. This is her take on what’s been going on here after a 2 month visit that ended in October.
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the government is now in the phase of deciding how the new waste management system is going to look like. It seems as if they are going to divide the city into three big zones instead of 6, and are trying to attract foreign service providers as well in the new 'pliego'. They will furthermore prolong the time-frame of the contracts with the collection companies to 10 years instead of 4 and companies will be paid per ton of waste again instead of area cleaned. In the area of recycling, the plan is that the containers for the recyclables will be taken away again, and instead they want to implement a door-to-door collection system (similar to the Ceibo practice) in the entire city, which will supposedly be done by the cooperatives. They want to equip them with trucks and other equipment to be able to do this and are saying that they want to heavily invest in awareness campaigns for the population. Knowing that the new 'pliego' will probably be starting in 2009, it is obvious that the cooperatives as they are now do not have the capacity to do this, so they are afraid that the government will use the new system as an excuse so that they can claim that the cooperatives are unable to deliver this service after a while, and privatize the entire recycling area.
On the other hand, the cooperatives seem to be getting more interconnected and united. The ones who should be in charge of a centro verde have made legal claims against the government due to the fact that almost no material from the big scale generators (gran generadores) is reaching them. This had the effect that the government was pressured and had to fire some responsibles from the waste department, and is now trying to make a study on how much material should actually reach each centro verde in order to be able to monitor whether the collection companies are fulfilling their contracts.
In order to finance part of the new collection system for recyclables, the government is introducing a tax which will be paid by the producers of goods, depending on the characteristics of the packaging, the product itself, and the production processes, the more it contaminates, the more the company has to pay.
We shall see how all of this adds up.