Overview
Few municipal waste management systems in Argentina include any form of separated recyclables collection leading to extremely low recycling rates and material recovery.
Our vision is to build recycling into existing waste collection systems by designing services that fit within municipal budgets and create value for local communities. We started with a pilot in Barrio Mugica, an informal community of ~40,000 residents in Buenos Aires in 2019 and have now expanded to the city of Olavarria. Our next stop: transforming waste management systems of clusters of cities at once, within Argentina and across Latin America. In addition, we are working with corporate players on the demand side to create traceability and transparency, improve logistics, and build local markets to reliably absorb the supply of recycled materials on an ongoing basis at a fair price. In combination, these efforts will help Argentina to build a thriving recycling industry contributing to its transition to a circular economy.
Rethinking Recycling - Argentina
Initiatives
The Challenge
Across Latin America, informal waste pickers have organized for decades to form cooperative labor groups, bring attention to the value of recycling, and secure access rights to waste and government support. Forward-looking cities, innovative social enterprises, and nonprofits have also made important strides in building the circular economy, creating new livelihoods in working with waste. Despite these advances, few municipal waste management systems in Argentina include any form of separated recyclables collection. As a result recycling rates in Latin America remain frustratingly low, especially for materials like flexible plastics and organic waste – in Argentina, only an estimated 8% of all recyclable materials are being recycled.
Meanwhile, landfills are reaching capacity and illegal dumping practices continue to threaten public health. The opportunity ahead: building on the region’s success in social inclusion while embedding recycling into municipal waste programs, to achieve holistic waste solutions at scale.
Proof-of-Concept: ATR Barrio 31
In Barrio Mugica (formerly Barrio 31), a ~40,000-resident informal community in the center of Buenos Aires, we partnered with the city and the 13 active labor cooperatives to establish recycling and composting services.
Residents of the Barrio named the program A Todo Reciclaje (ATR), or “Recycling for All,” playing off the title of a local popular song. Through a collaborative process with the community and the labor cooperatives, we developed effective, affordable methods to support residents in building new recycling habits, including a “try recycling, get your kit” activation initiative, education sessions at their doorstep, and innovative labeled hooks on buildings for hanging sorted waste out of reach of stray dogs. Local shops receive equipment suited to their retail operations and additional support as influencers in the community. Cooperative workers receive training not just in waste management operations, but also professional skills such as public speaking, creative problem solving, and interpreting data.
The ATR recycling facility is unique in Argentina in that it is operated jointly by multiple labor cooperatives, with the sale of recyclables providing supplementary income to workers. Barrio Mugica residents and shops now receive reliable recycling and waste management service, including the first residential organics collection service anywhere in the City of Buenos Aires. After two years, Barrio Mugica has the highest recycling rates in the city.
ATR has drawn accolades as a best-practice example for inclusive urban transformation, and remains a showcase of our work. Residents enjoy cleaner streets, and cooperative members feel empowered by the social, environmental, and financial impacts of their work. By increasingly taking ownership of the program, these waste workers are becoming the real agents of change committed to the continued growth of this program.
Scale-up Initiative: GIRO Olavarría
Building on our experience in Barrio Mugica, we’re taking our work from a community-level to a city-level program in Olavarría, a mid-sized industrial city in Argentina. Called GIRO, for “Gestión Integral de Residuos de Olavarría” (Integrated Waste Management of Olavarría), the program aims to create a replicable, economically sustainable and inclusive model for municipal waste management in Argentina.
When we arrived, Olavarría had a formal recycling rate of less than 1%. Our work, in partnership with the Alliance to End Plastic Waste and Amcor, aims to achieve recycling rates comparable to leading cities globally, through a combination of community and worker engagement, collection service changes, infrastructure setup, and business model innovation. Together with the City of Olavarria, we’re co-developing a model for transforming recycling and composting to engage all 120,000+ residents, as well as the local recycling cooperative and industry partners in the regional circular economy.
Our Impact
In Barrio Mugica (formerly Barrio 31), a ~40,000-resident informal community in the center of Buenos Aires, we partner with city staff as well as with the 13 labor cooperatives active in the community, to provide waste and recycling collection services.
Approach
Partnering to Scale Impact Across
Argentina and Latin America
As we begin to scale our program to additional cities, we are partnering with Red Innovación Local (RIL), a network of more than 280 Argentine cities. Together we have launched an innovation group to guide a cohort of five cities—Bahía Blanca, Bariloche, Mendoza, Posadas, and Santa Fe—to identify their waste management challenges and deliver targeted, human-centered solutions that can be replicated across Argentina and elsewhere in Latin America. In collaboration with other members of RIL’s Public-Private Alliance for the Environment, which includes Coca-Cola, Genneia, Enel, Syngenta, Möbel Citta, and Fundación Avina, we aim to boost Argentina’s circular economy by co-designing, piloting, institutionalizing, and scaling waste management solutions in cities across the nation.
Also supporting our work with RIL is the World Economic Forum’s Scale360° initiative, which has built a global network of impact partners to drive real progress in building circular economies around the world. We are bringing Scale360°’s Circular Innovation Playbook to our innovation cohort of cities to advance their circularity.
Leveraging Technology
As with our work in Indonesia, we use technology in Argentina to empower waste workers and residents to lead the recycling transformation. In Barrio Mugica, for example, collection workers use QR code technology to track detailed data on recyclables, compostables, and mixed waste collected, enabling them to compare week-on-week performance and find appropriate solutions to problems that arise.
In Olavarría, we plan to bring both the operations platform and chatbot developed in Indonesia. The operations platform will be adapted to the more mechanized processes in Olavarría’s new recyclables sorting plant, and we plan to partner with recycling processors to extend the platform to trace recyclable waste from household doorstep to processor gate.
Bringing Supply and Demand Together
Our work with Barrio Mugica, Olavarría, and RIL aims to establish productive, cost-effective waste management systems as the “first mile” of recycling, and to lay the groundwork for a reliable and ethical supply chain for companies seeking to source recycled material. The next step is addressing the major challenges further along the recycling value chain in Argentina, such as building cost-effective aggregation and logistics networks, and translating corporate commitments into real recycling transactions. Working with nonprofits, recycling industry players, and corporate buyers, we’re now turning to solving these demand-side challenges.
What’s Ahead
- Scaling our solutions to 1-2 million citizens nationwide in partnership with like-minded organizations, such as Red Innovación Local
- Introducing digital solutions to trace material flows from at least a dozen cities in Argentina to processors, in partnership with leaders in the Argentinian recycling industry
- Growing and stabilizing the supply of recycled waste to meet the demand and excess capacity of processors nationwide
- Pursuing opportunities to launch our solutions in neighboring countries in Latin America
Our Argentina Team
Partners
