Soft collaboration

INTI (Instituto Nacional de Technologia Industrial) , a federal Government institution here in Buenos Aires, has some very intriguing functions. I would have imagined that it might be able to help us identify the location of a hotpress or advise us on other technical...

The plot thickens

A meeting with the City Government office, specifically the research group of the Politicas de Reciclado Urbano, proved quite a remarkable surprise. From what we had heard both before and after our arrival, we imagined a meeting with some dusty, defensive bureaucrats...

Bottles on Cars

We’ve been in BA for six weeks and during each of those weeks we’ve seen parked cars or pickups with large liquid-filled bottles on their hoods or roofs. At first it was just a curiosity, and we had fun trying to guess what was going on, but eventually the...

Variations

Last week disappeared very quickly in a kaleidoscope of visits to all manner of extraordinary places outside the city. The first visit was to La Vallol where went to visit a ‘Barrios de Pie’ home building project. Except there were no building materials and so no work...

Who owns the waste?

The question of who owns the waste is a constant theme here in Buenos Aires. It is clear that the residents are made aware that they dont own it once its put in the street. The private/public organisations that run the trucks to collect the waste believe they own it,...

Separation and solidarity

Today we went to the Bajo Flores recycling centre in another very poor barrio. The collective here has developed a separation plant – the first of four planned in Buenos Aires, where the members buy waste, delivered to them in trucks (which sometimes arrive at...