Argentina’s already precarious economy has experienced a difficult year, with soaring inflation and an increase in poverty across the country. In addition, the recent national and local elections have resulted in a large number of changes in governance. Against this dynamic context, the fact that our programs have continued to move forward with the continued support of local municipalities and other partners provides two important insights.

First, the transition towards a circular economy is not necessarily limited to periods of economic well-being. Many cities in Argentina already have the basic infrastructure in place and can achieve important results with small strategic investments and are willing to do so.

Second, better waste management is increasingly prioritized across the broader political sphere.

As a result, despite changes in elected political party in many of the cities where we work, Delterra has already confirmed commitment from the new administrations to continue the work on our programs.

Our partners’ support

Managing political continuity for our projects during and after elections is a challenging task. Entire municipal teams are often replaced in the transition to new administrations, often in a matter of weeks and with many existing initiatives and projects discontinued. So it has been truly inspiring to note the efforts of outgoing local administrations to ensure that their successors would maintain agreed commitments to Delterra. During this turbulent year, an additional four Argentine mayors formally committed to implementing a long-term transition towards circular systems with our support.

Some highlights from the year

• We started the year by finalizing the handover of our first project in Buenos Aires back to the city and local cooperatives, and it has been truly wonderful to watch it continue to grow and prosper thanks to their successful competencies and ownership.
• Then we saw our first full-city transformation come to life in Olavarría and have now rolled out an entire new waste system with recycling and composting to almost everyone in this 120,000-people city.
• Towards the middle of the year, we completed our first pilot in material traceability, implementing blockchain technology to promote data sharing and ethical sourcing for recycled material.
• In September, we saw our scaling program – which replicates the learnings from Olavarría, in another 10 cities in Argentina – recover its first 1,000 tons. We created a market for and recovered another almost 1,000 tons of flexible plastics in Buenos Aires, which were previously going to landfill.
• We also grew our collaboration with waste workers, supporting the establishment of formal cooperatives, upskilling over 100 waste workers and improving the lives of hundreds more.

Outlook for Argentina

In this highly dynamic end-of-year context, it is hard to say exactly what next year will look like in Argentina. Despite this, we remain confident in the outlook for circularity across the country. Our work has demonstrated that in Argentina at least, significant impact can be achieved by working to optimize the already existing recycling value chains, without necessarily requiring significant investment.

The benefits of this work are also objectively clear and coherent with multiple political perspectives. Circular systems not only reduce contamination and greenhouse gas emissions; they also create new revenue streams and better jobs, enable a closer collaboration between stakeholders involved in the waste value chain, and provide better data-driven decision making and transparency.

Delterra’s work is inevitably intertwined with the local political and economic context of the countries it supports. Our approach must therefore be resilient and in step with the dynamic contexts within which it is set.

This blog was contributed by:

Federico di Penta
Regional Director, Latin America
Delterra
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