Trash Talk
In megacities across the globe, the poorest populations are doing incredible things with rubbish. Madeleine Morley explores some of the most exciting and empowering initiatives.
Words Madeleine Morley
In 1921, a young Italian immigrant in Los Angeles began to collect broken crockery, green 7-Up cans, blue milk of magnesia bottles and scraps of steel, placing them all into a canvas bag as he trudged along the trash-strewn streets of his poor neighbourhood of Watts. In an abandoned lot the construction worker then began fashioning metal into spiralling vertical shapes, organising shimmering slivers of glass and random fragments of plastic into dazzling, Gaudi-esque mosaics. His name was Sabato Rodia, and for 33 years he worked on his Nuestro Pueblo sculptures, a name that translates to ‘Our Town’, at a site now known as The Watts Towers.
Rodia made his colourful jazz cathedral from unwanted junk, from the things that people initially coveted and then didn’t want at all. As he reorganised the pieces into something meaningful and beautiful, he was entirely unknown, alone in America and poor.
Waste is often a sign of wealth, a symbol of consumption and overwhelming abundance. As cities get richer and larger — as they become mega — they consume and produce more and more, and locations to dump that endless waste become harder and harder to find.
Waste is also a symbol of imbalance. There are those who consume and create huge amounts of trash, and there are those who deal with other people’s waste: garbage collectors, office cleaners, and in the most destitute parts of the world, the men, women and children who sift through trash to find scraps that they can sell on to recycling centres.The latter take different names depending on their time and place: there are the cart-pushing catadores of Brazil; the 300,000 plastic bag-wielding rag- pickers of Delhi; and in 19th Century France there were the chiffoniers, who Baudelaire spied, “Each bent double by the junk he carries / The jumbled vomit of enormous Paris”. Like the detritus that they collect, these are unwanted, overlooked people who are pushed to the edges of cities; they slip through the cracks of the economy, traversing a monotonous landscape of rubbish, and seeing in other people’s unwanted garbage something of value and use.
When looking at the local projects in cities around the world that attempt to directly tackle the waste crisis, there is consensus that there needs to be a change in what is considered ‘waste’. As Susan Strasser, author of Waste and Want, wrote, “What counts as trash depends on who’s counting.” The discarded needs to be bought out from the stinking margins, swept back out from under the carpet, and along with it the people who inhabit and work with trash.
In Cairo, zabaleen and their donkeys are only permitted to hunt through the streets after hours when the lights are out. They are social outcasts, con ned to the shadows. In Chennai, India, economically and socially rejected rag-pickers have slowly been issued ID cards in an attempt to legitimise their line of work and counteract social stigma.
One local Chennai project, Paperman, is taking a step further towards readdressing the balance between wasters and waste-workers. The initiative introduces waste collectors to the people whose dumpsters they sift, promoting a system where households hand over clean recyclables to pickers from their front doors. Instead of unhygienic dumpster diving, the pickers become familiar, welcome faces in neighbourhoods.
If Paperman takes off, the results will be transformative and the humiliating title of ‘rag-picker’ will be renewed as the dignified ‘paperman’. In Lagos — a city whose 12,000 tonnes of daily trash is suffocating and crushing the streets — a similar local program called Wecyclers encourages a visible, front door exchange of recyclables. The charity provides waste-collectors with nifty bikes to navigate narrow streets,while households are rewarded with redeemable points via SMS for the plastic and card they provide.
Like the Indian rag-picker, the São Paulo catadore also bears the brunt of social stigma. Their scrap- lled carts, or corroça, are the focus of a project fronted by graffiti artist Muntado called Pimp My Corroça. Muntado and his team of artists paint over the tattered wooden frames, spraying them with golden ashes and authoritative re marks, installing security systems so that the corraças are visually striking and unique. Like Paperman, the project is not so much about recycling trash, but about reinventing the social connotations of the waste collectors, purposefully shoving the catadores into view.
Trash is the most obtainable resource in Manila; it’s an engine of growth in the city’s informal economy, a sector with a monumental volume of supply. Bric-a-brac towns are built atop the spongy surface of landfills like the Payatas dump, where a slum community continually scavenges through garbage bags, selling scraps in pop-up junk shacks on the landfill’s edge. Old women rummage through compost, picking discarded meat from old bones, which they boil and then sauté to make pagpag. They sell the jumbled meat to fellow dumpster dwellers, who add salt, vinegar or ketchup — it’s a food source for days when scrap earnings are particularly poor.
A few years ago, Payatas dump resident and recycling entrepreneur Jaime Salada invented the ‘laundry brush’ after finding rolls of discarded insulation foam buried in the site. He removed the outer layer of aluminium and wrapped the foam in plastic netting, creating a brush for washing clothes — which in the Philippines is usually done by hand. The product took off and is now sold in supermarkets across the city. There are probably countless other innovative uses of trash executed by waste collectors around the world; the challenge is how to spirit these ideas away from the dump, along with the resourceful use of materials and people who live and work there.
When Sabato Rodia built ‘Our Town’ he created a new world from his current landscape of forgotten and unwanted debris. He deftly mosaicked garbage and proudly carved his initials into concrete, creating a vision of an ideal city belonging to the catadores, the rag-pickers, the chiffoniers and the zabaleen. Perhaps the future of megacities won’t be silver skyscrapers or glass bubbles, but glorious towers built from 7-Up bottles and plastic cartons: a sustainable network configured from the materials that we still use everyday, but no longer discard without a second thought.
This is article is from Weapons of Reason’s second issue: Megacities.
Weapons of Reason is a publishing project to understand and articulate the global challenges shaping our world by Human After All design agency.
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