New perspectives on the work of waste pickers: the construction of a recycling nodein Mercedes, Argentina

Abstract

The city of Mercedes, in Buenos Aires Province, is one of the five Argentine cities where a recycling node (see 1 below) will be created. Different social actors will take part in this initiative: the cooperative of waste pickers (see 2 below) that is already working in the area, the social movement in which they participate (the “Excluded Workers Movement”), local workers and public officials. This project shows the change of paradigm related to the management of recycling throughout the world, especially, the way in which the problem of informal waste picking has been formulated up to now.It is important to highlight that those who carry out this activity have generally been the most marginalized sectors of society, those that are often stigmatized, criminalized and expelled from urban centers. However, in the last ten years it is possible to recognize the enactment of a new perspective towards these actors. A set of public initiatives aimed at formalizing the work of waste pickers have been developed. In this direction, it is possible to mention the opening of records, the provision of tools, the economic stimuli for the multiplication of work cooperatives, the technical support and legal advice and the integration of waste pickers in the design of public policies. At the same time, the waste pickers were setting up their own spaces for collective organization following the model of unions in Argentina, as they sought to represent not only the claims of the sector but also those of informal urban workers, which they call “workers for the popular economy”.From an ethnographic perspective, the present work will analyze the changes concerning the policies related to the management of recyclables in Argentina in the last decade. The case of the city of Mercedes has been chosen as an example of the complexity that the formalization of a previously forbidden work implies. Moreover, the participation of social movements and their disputes around the dichotomy "legal/illegal" and "formal/informal" will be analyzed, taking the aspect of the criminalization of workers into account.