Recover the community’s ability to produce : the experience of El Ceibo in Argentina

Low-income sectors often face tough obstacles and tensions that make it hard to act collectively. But a small group of people, made up of 40 families in a poor Buenos Aires neighborhood, overcame those barriers and organized to change the conscience of residents in Palermo, a trendy Buenos Aires neighborhood, through a collective of garbage recyclers known as El Ceibo .

« We don’t recover the material first, we recover people, don’t forget that all of us have a very hard personal history. In 1996 we started writing this project, an environmental project, and the first thing we asked ourselves was: “who does the rubbish belong to ?”. Because there was a law on rubbish which prohibited collecting rubbish from the street, and there we realized that the rubbish belonged to the ones who generated it. The thing is that there’s people who don’t think this can be done... What I mean is that they do it because they think the rest don’t do it, but the good thing is that when they find out that there are already eight hundred neighbours, there they get enthusiastic, they also start participating. As the project is ours, the thing changed. The neighbour separates his garbage, keeps it until the person from El Ceibo who collects and recovers the garbage, and there you can see that they don’t do it because they feel sorry, the neighbour is already participating. Do you realize what all of this means? This is a new Argentina. Let’s say that what we are doing is producing, generating work, a new business. »

• See a video about El Ceibo

• Read the presentation of El Ceibo below, published in ReVista (Harvard Review of Latin America)