The Matanza, Buenos Aires, Argentina – under a punishing sun, Gabriela Villalba plunges her hands into a mountain of waste. She launches bottles, paper and cardboard in their designated places with a precision practiced.
Villalba works at the Cooperative Recycling Factory for the buildyendo desde Abajo. Behind her, an inactive treadmill – a machine which once promised to modernize the factory operation but which now collects the dust, without five workers required to make it work. Many people are gone, says Villalba because the work no longer pays enough.
The Argentine recycling system collapses. Cooperatives belonging to workers collect, sort, weigh and pack recyclable materials, which they sell to the companies that recycled them. But the country began to import virgin paper and cardboard for recycling in mid-2014, and in less than a year, the prices of recyclables have dropped dramatically. Between January 2024 and January of this year, the price per kilo of cardboard fell by 55%, 70%scrap and 68%glass.
A third of cooperatives have closed. Half of their workers, including Cartoneros – Waste pickers at the street level who once formed the backbone of the Argentina recycling ecosystem – have completely abandoned their carts. According to the Federación Argentina de Cartoneros, Carreros Y Recicladores, a National Cartoneros Federation, the number of people working in recycling cooperatives increased from 18,000 in 2023 to 10,000 in January of this year.
“I had to leave. I went from 40,000 to 20,000 pesos per day. This no longer lets me eat in peace, ”explains Nelson Villasboa, who recently delivered his latest cardboard load.
To complicate questions, the government published a decree on January 3 for deregulation of export and import of non -hazardous recoverable waste. This decree actually ended two significant restrictions: a 16 -year ban on scrap exports and a two -year ban on plastic exports. The prohibitions were designed to ensure that local industries maintained priority access to these precious materials. The government says this decision will help reduce production costs for small and medium -sized enterprises. During a conference in Washington, DC on February 21, President Javier Milei told the Inter -American Development Bank that his administration had eliminated the scrap export restrictions, benefiting in many and finally setting a market price on the scrap. The impacts of the decree are not yet clear, but Jorge Santkovsky, of the SCRAP & REZAGOS electronic waste company, is optimistic. He thinks that exports can encourage the recovery of materials that are generally not recycled in Argentina because it is not lucrative.
“The metal is worth a lot abroad,” he says, “but here it is thrown because of its low price.”
Despite Santkovsky’s optimism, with fewer waste pickers in the streets, more recyclable materials are found in discharges or open discharges. And once the recyclables are mixed with waste, very little can be recovered, explains Leonardo Maceiras, director of operations of Coordinación Ecológica Área Metropolitana Sociedad del Estado, the company which manages the solid urban waste in the metropolitan region of Buenos Aires.
Argentina waste management operates on parallel tracks: a formal system in which private companies collect cleaning garbage and an informal network in which independent cartoneros (in English, “cardboard people”) manage most recycling . Although the municipalities supervise both, because they do not have sufficient resources to better manage recyclable materials, they prioritize the funding of garbage collection compared to recycling programs, explains Mariana Saidón, specialist in the environmental economy and waste management.
Recycling is left to the cardboard.
The municipal officials did not respond to requests for comments.
Cartoneros largely emerged during the economic crisis of Argentina in 2001, which plunged a lot into extreme poverty. Many of the garbage was recovered to find food anyway. While the middle class collapsed, many formerly comfortable families found themselves joining the ranks of urban waste pickers.
Global waste trade has historically allowed countries to recycle the materials that they could not deal with at the national level. However, the last decade has seen growing restrictions in the world. China, formerly a large, beneficiary of plastic waste, had prohibited all imports of solid waste by 2021, and countries like India and Thailand have recently prohibited imports of plastic waste to combat pollution.
The January decree of Argentina moves in the opposite direction. Importers must only submit affidavits declaring waste like Non Hazard, and environmental authorities have only 10 days to oppose automatic approval.
In a press release, the industry and trade secretariat, which is in charge of implementing the decree, as well as the environmental subsecretariat, explained that the decree considerably rations for import and The export of recyclables such as paper, cardboard, metal and glass rationalize considerably. Companies will no longer need to prove the unavailability of local equipment or go through extended bureaucratic procedures – marking a substantial change in the way recyclable -materiau will be made.
“If there is no control, anything can enter. There is a risk of all kinds of entering materials, with traces of contamination, ”explains Héctor Manuel González of Asociación Civil Basura Cero, an organization of recycling of electronic waste.
What worries him is that this incoming scrap can be part of machines that once contained liquids, very polluting gas or solids, such as heavy metals.
The environmental subsecretariat at the Tourism, Environment and Sports Secretariat, which is the body responsible for reviewing these affidavits, has not responded to requests for comments from Global Press Journal.
In the meantime, recyclables are throwing up the streets more and more.
“You can always see bottles in the street from the (Christmas) holidays which, in the past, have not even lasted two days,” explains Matías Capobllanco, a representative of the Cartoneros Federation.
And the cartoneros say they see no way out. Antonio Sosa, a cartonero, says that he made 40,000 Argentinian pesos (US $ 38) per load of recyclables a year ago. Now, each charge is only worth 7,000 pesos (US $ 7).
“It goes from bad to worse,” he says.
