Recyling Urbanism
What is the culture of recycling? For most of us on this site, it means sorting our trash, buying less stuff, and reading labels with the same care that we check out price tags. At a recent lecture for the UCI Design Alliance, I learned about the communities of collectos in huge cities like Sao Paolo, Brazil, who are using trash in order to build new social and economic possibilities for themselves and their cities.
Maria Cecilia Loschiavo dos Santos is a philosopher and design educator at the School of Architecture and Urbanism, University of São Paulo. She has worked for many years with COOPAMARE, a collective of collectos in São Paulo. Some are homeless; others live in the great favelas or slums that make Sao Paolo into the fourth largest city in the world; others live in low-income projects. The favelas themselves are shanty towns built from discarded materials, so a form of recycling is built into the mindset of many collectos. All support themselves by gathering trash from streets and homes in wagons and bringing them to a collection center that they have built under a viaduct in a middle-class neighborhood in the city. Negotiations with the neighborhood and the city have led to a semi-permanent arrangement for these urban professionals, allowing them to translate trash into cash, and poverty into sustainability.
On my street, the collection is all done by big trucks. The recycling industry must also be employing the poorest people in the area, but I doubt it’s empowering them. The first Jane Jacobs Medal for New Ideas and Activism is going to Omar Freilla, 33, founder of the Green Worker Cooperative in the South Bronx, which is creating “green collar” jobs for local residents by collecting construction waste. Recycling is not just about sorting your trash. It’s about building communities.
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