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South America

From Colombian garbage pickers to dealing with rodents in Argentinian shantytowns and recycling film in Brazilian cinema, South Americans are creative in their approaches to waste. They find a myriad of interesting ways to resolve the problems it causes or to utilize waste to their advantage, transforming it into a social, economic, and artistic resource. Creative and socially engaged responses to waste illustrate how it is more than just the end product of social and cultural practices. Waste in South America is involved in the production and transformation of social and cultural life. How waste is valued and used can reveal a great deal about social relations in specific contexts across South America.

The State of Garbage

South America produces approximately 16 percent of the world's solid waste, over 120 million tons per year. Much of this is concentrated in megalopolises such as São Paulo and Buenos Aires. These cities, with populations greater than 10 million inhabitants, produce more than 10,000 tons of garbage each day—enough to fill a stadium in one week. This presents a major environmental management challenge for governments carrying heavy debt loads. There are also significant issues with agricultural refuse, industrial waste, and air pollution. Environmental neglect, social exclusion, and poor sanitation infrastructure have meant that the prodigious output of garbage creates serious public health problems. These are especially severe among marginal and shantytown populations and those eking out a living from garbage collection, either as formal employees or as informal recyclers.

South American waste harms those who, because of social and economic marginalization in some of the most unequal societies on Earth, least produce waste. The issue has therefore been firmly interwoven with struggles for social justice. Continent-wide political liberalization since the late 1980s has been accompanied by a boom in community associations and social movements, and this has had a dramatic impact on the manner in which South Americans deal with garbage. Thousands of grassroots recyclers’ associations and cooperatives have joined ranks with other community organizations to promote the rights and interests of recycling workers and communities affected by garbage and pollution. To this end, they utilize a vibrant mix of political activism, social entrepeneurship, and creative cultural disruption.

Waste or Resource

Whether garbage is considered a waste or a resource depends upon whether it can be usefully and safely redeployed and whether anyone is willing to redeploy it. There are categories of waste that are unlikely ever to be reusable and are therefore pure waste, rather than resources in waiting. In South America, effluent and industrial pollution are perhaps the most important categories of unrecyclable waste and the most difficult to deal with. Poor infrastructure and lax waste management practices have led to both acute and chronic problems. For instance, in 1996, a lead-zinc tailing dam in Bolivia broke, dumping 235,000 tons of mercury-infused toxic waste into the Agua Castilla River, causing the death of three children who drank water from the river and damaging crops on nearby farmland. Improper disposal of garbage, effluent, and industrial waste exacerbates chronic problems of sanitation, leading to hospitalization rates of 400–1,000 persons per 100,000 per year in the worst-affected areas.

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