Waste management in the 14,5 million people metropolis of Buenos Aires went through major transformations since the 2000s. In the midst of the crisis of 2001, citizens claim for a management more respectful of environment. This rupture recalls the beginning of the sociotechnical waste management system in 1977. After their coup d’Etat, the military government launched one of the biggest project of metropolitan planning. The waste of Buenos Aires participates into the physical building of the territories, until the waste landfill neighbors complain about the incomplete sanitary security the system provides them. The paper lay on the hypothesis that discontinuities and reorganization into waste management are linked with spatial and temporal dynamics in the metropolis. Crisis appear as good tools to understand the differentiated evolution of an agglomeration unequally linked to the rest of the world but quite dependent on international recommendations to plan the future. The work divides up into three parts that explore what time “do” to public territorial action in the waste area. The first one focuses on the building of the cinturón ecológico in 1977. The second one shows how the whole metropolitan device collapses in 2001 with changes into the metropolitan territories, the environmental paradigm and territorial governance. The last one exposes that the transformations after this this crisis generate unprecedented questions on the way of acting well in the future, learning lessons from the past.