Buenos Aires, Argentina — When the lights go down in this city’s
commercial district, an army of workers descends upon the
emptied streets. Pushing homemade carts, these cartoneros, or
cardboard collectors, scavenge the trash of wealthy
neighborhoods for recyclables. “I was hit by bad luck. I had to
go and live under a bridge because I was evicted,” said Maria
Julia Navarro. “To be able to feed my children, I had to go out
onto the streets gathering cardboard and paper.” The phenomenon
is a legacy of Argentina’s 2001 financial crisis, when large
groups traveled from the city's mushrooming slums hoping to
scavenge enough to survive. For the last decade, city officials
did what they could to keep them off the streets. But now the
city hopes cartoneros will become a crucial tool to reduce
waste. “It’s been ten years since we’ve been rising up and
struggling against the bureaucracy of the government,” said
Christina Lescano is the director of el Ceibo, one one of the
city’s best-known cartonero cooperatives. “The