Cartoneros face an uncertain future in Buenos Aires

“There are days I’m just stiff, my back is stiff, and I have to just keep going.”

For 20 years, Amalia has made a living collecting cardboard and other recyclable waste from the streets of Buenos Aires. Like thousands of other cartoneros – informal recyclers who recover material from the city’s rubbish before it reaches landfill – she walks long distances each day, pulling loads that can weigh more than 120 kilos, barely earning enough from their resale to survive.

Last year, authorities in Buenos Aires City banned the handcarts Amalia once used to haul her collections. Now, aged 60, she drags a heavy sack over her shoulder instead. The work has become even more physically punishing, but she says she has little choice.

“I have to pull the bag,” she said. “I’ve sort of become an animal.”

The cartoneros have been a part of Buenos Aires for more than two decades. Born out of Argentina's devastating 2001 economic crisis, they evolved from an informal workforce scavenging the capital’s bins into a network of cooperatives recognised by law and integrated into the capital’s recycling system. 

Today, however, that model is under mounting pressure. City Mayor Jorge Macri’s administration wants to reshape waste collection with stricter enforcement, private contractors and technology-driven monitoring, raising questions over whether thousands of workers like Amalia still have a place in the city’s future.

 

From crisis to way of life

Amalia is one of roughly 6,000 cartoneros in and around Buenos Aires. They emerged as a mass phenomenon after the financial collapse of December 2001 sent tens of thousands of newly unemployed people into the capital.

Horse-drawn carts flooded into the city from the south. Their riders sought to make a living pulling recyclables from municipal rubbish bins and reselling them to manufacturers.

Yesica, a cartonera working the bin beside Amalia, has been at it since the 2001 crisis. “We were called ‘light bugs’ because we only appeared at night,” she recalled in an interview. “The neighbours would come out and give us the white paper they wouldn’t use anymore, or books, things we could sell.”

Asked how the situation is today compared to when she started, 25 years ago, Yesica was desperate. “We've gone back to 2001,” she said. “We cannot eat. We have to cook on a wood fire because we cannot afford gas.”

What little money she receives for her job is “not even a salary,” says Yesica. “They’re trying to keep us fed with bread crumbs.”

The comparison is more than nostalgia. Years of economic instability have left more and more Argentines navigating the thin line between work and survival. Today, the people who helped build the capital’s recycling system say they are once again fighting for their survival.

Despite entering the public consciousness following the 2001 financial crisis, the cartonero phenomenon has deeper roots in Argentine history. Sociologist Pablo Schamber has found references in City Hall records dating to the 1860s documenting workers collecting and selling recyclable material.

Buenos Aires was expanding rapidly then. Argentina was becoming known as the granary of the world for the fertility of the surrounding pampa. But the fertile topsoil around the city, instead of being used for agriculture, was stripped from the land around the city and fired into the bricks going up in it. That soil takes about 10,000 years to regenerate. Once exhausted, the pits were abandoned and eventually became dumps and lagoons on the city's edge.

 

Building a system

Between 2003 and 2010, the Buenos Aires City government negotiated a system around the cartoneros that saw the establishment of 12 cooperatives. Each was assigned the neighbourhood territory its members worked informally. Recovery and sorting infrastructure was to be funded by the City, with an incentive paid to each registered worker in addition to whatever they sold at the depot.

It was a slow, incremental formalisation, which was gradually established through law: Ley 992 in 2002 recognised the cartoneros as urban recyclers; Ley 1854 in 2005 established ‘Basura Cero,’ a programme requiring the city to progressively reduce waste sent to landfill and formalise source separation with the cooperatives as its operational instrument.

Under the scheme, cooperatives assigned workers to routes, recorded data informing the city's subsidy calculations and distributed proceeds from recovered material.

“What we believed was that the cartonero was part of a system. We were involved in the drafting of the laws,” said Alejandro Gianni, a sociologist who helped found the RUO (Recuperadores Urbanos del Oeste) cooperative, based in Caballito, more than two decades ago, in an interview.

RUO’s Parque site in Caballito, once a vacant lot used by the cooperative as a drop-off point for the cartoneros, has been transformed over the years. Complaints from nearby residents about 200 workers sorting on-site each day pushed the cooperative to improve relations with neighbours. The area was reforested and slowly turned into a park, complete with a vegetable garden, a small classroom-amphitheatre, and community programming.

The cooperative also runs primary- and secondary-school equivalency classes for its members, a composting line, an electronic-waste operation and a small market where workers buy groceries wholesale. 

The exterior walls of the depot, once bare sheet metal, are now covered with colourful murals of rolling hills. A stylised cartonero, complete with a bag filled with cardboard, extends their hands towards a smiling man holding a box filled with groceries.

Gianni says City Hall has increasingly outsourced functions that cooperatives once handled themselves.

“They outsource the maintenance to companies and the companies don't do their job, so it's more expensive for everyone,” he said. “They give you summer clothes for winter and winter clothes for summer. So it really makes no sense how they're handling this public policy.”

“On one side, if you let yourself be on the paranoid side, you would say, well, they don’t want to see it – because if they wanted to fix it, they would take good care of it,” said the sociologist.

 

Politics of recycling

Sergio Sánchez helped found the Movimiento de Trabajadores Excluidos (MTE), one of the largest workers’ groups in Argentina, more than two decades ago. He now presides over the Federación Argentina de Cartoneros, Carreros y Recicladores, or FACCyR.

Sánchez sat down for an interview at a folding table behind a mass of workers waiting for a meal. His organisation also runs an open-air kitchen three days a week, providing 5,000 meals on a service day.

In March 2013, when Jorge Bergoglio was elected pope, Sánchez was one of his three personal guests at the inaugural Mass hosted by Pope Francis at the Vatican. The pontiff championed the cartoneros throughout his papacy, often noting that the Latin American popular economy was the world’s most underestimated economic force.

Twelve years later, clad in an MTE-branded hoodie, Sánchez described what he sees as a reversal. “Today we are seeing pushback and a de-evolution,” he said. “It’s a setback. Previous administrations helped, but now rights that had been built are being lost.”

The MTE was co-founded by Juan Grabois, a lawyer and activist who ran in the 2023 presidential primaries for the Peronist opposition. He too was close to Pope Francis and met with the pontiff on several occasions.

State subsidies to the 12 cooperatives flow through their leadership; the federation Sánchez presides over is a political constituency as well as a labour force. 

Gianni, at RUO, noted the pattern in the movement itself. MTE, he says, “grew bigger because they could draw more resources from the states” through political ties.

Rodrigo Balbuena Nürnberg, a lawyer who served as counsel for the libertarian La Libertad Avanza party during Javier Milei’s presidential campaign, had a sharper reading of the cooperatives.

"You have the cartoneros that are politically organised... not completely free because they do have their leaders, which are social or left-wing leaders,” he said.

Nürnberg claimed that some cooperatives take public funding and “send it straight to a US account.”

“The city government has it a little cleaner – they have good fake invoices, and the leaders of the situation just let it go through because at the end of the day they gain benefit," he alleged.

Balbuena provided no evidence for the allegations, but suspicion of the groups is not uncommon.

A Buenos Aires resident who grew up in a family of cartoneros, but who asked not to be identified, said he since disconnected from the cooperatives. “It’s all crooked,” he claimed.

 

Hostility and unrest

City Mayor Macri’s administration has become explicitly hostile towards the cartoneros. The squeeze is presented as a crackdown on inefficiency and dedication to public order.

That conflict spilled onto the streets in August, when workers, cooperatives and social organisations marched through the capital to protest plans for a new dry-waste tender that they say could hand much of the recycling system to private companies. 

The proposed overhaul would divide the capital into six operating zones and introduce greater use of GPS, telemetry and private contractors in collection and processing – changes cooperatives warn could threaten thousands of livelihoods and dismantle the socially inclusive model built over the past two decades.

The administration’s position is that the informal recycling network, whatever its social utility, helps create the clutter it claims to remove. It says cartoneros leave bags torn open on pavements every night.

 “We are dismantling a system that, far from providing solutions, has become part of the problem,” said Macri in a post on X last July.

The administration wants to transform the existing system into a formalised, privatised model, imitating the wet-waste contractor scheme.

Buenos Aires’ wet-waste contractors are made up of six firms, each holding one of the seven city zones (the seventh is handled by the public Ente de Higiene Urbana). 

They are, by the city’s own auditor’s account, the largest and worst-managed line in the hygiene budget. The capital’s elected auditor-general, Mariana Gagliardi, has spent two years documenting what that money buys.

Her office's most recent review examined AR$779 billion in payments to six private waste-collection firms during 2024 and found AR$56.9 billion credited in the accounting system to the wrong contractors.

The same report found that the city's Dirección General de Limpieza does not use a regional performance index to validate service quality, while 52 percent of citizen complaints about hygiene services went unresolved beyond the required timeframes.

The underlying contracts, awarded through Public Tender 997/2013 and extended, remain in force through 2028 by a 2021 executive resolution.

Back in May, Gagliardi posted on X: “We detected more than 57 billion pesos in payments incorrectly attributed to collection companies. But instead of monitoring the companies that do not comply, the city government mounts media operations that only affect workers from the most vulnerable neighbourhoods.”

Only the cartoneros’ share of the hygiene budget, roughly five percent, experienced meaningful cuts. 

Basic supplies the City once provided – bags, gloves, masks – are now purchased by the cartoneros out of pocket. In July last year, the Macri administration eliminated the six-billion-peso annual subsidy that brought 3,100 cartoneros into the city each morning from the Conurbano, the ring of densely populated municipalities that encircle the capital. 

The subsidy dated back to 2007, when it replaced the “carton train” that had previously carried workers into the capital.

Three cooperatives sued. In early September, after a four-day hunger strike by cartonero leaders, City Judge Alejandra Petrella ordered the bus service be restored for 3,500 recuperadores. 

The following day, Mayor Macri posted on X: “Justice wants to force us to finance again the transport of Grabois’ cartoneros from the Conurbano. We are going to appeal this absurd decision, which goes against the interests of porteños.” 

The appeal is pending.

 

A different vision

Schamber, a sociologist at the National University of Lanús who has studied informal recyclers in Buenos Aires since the 1990s, put the underlying logic simply. “The concern is cleanliness,” he told me. “Not the value or the valuation of the waste.”

On June 15 this year, Macri announced that the next hygiene contract would contemplate moving recycling plants, and with them the cooperatives that operate them, out of the capital entirely.

City Hall has been busy on the enforcement side too. More than 33,000 pavement rubbish containers have been retrofitted with narrow lids that prevent recyclable material from being pulled out.

The administration also expanded the Ojos en Calle scheme, a corps of 150 inspectors covering 15,000 city blocks each day. The programme’s 2023 specifications instructed inspectors to record the presence of recuperadores “collecting, accumulating, or doing related tasks regarding recyclable waste” – a judge later characterised the language as designating cartoneros a form of visual contamination and suspended the tender.

Macri’s government relaunched the programme in 2024. 

On August 4 of last year, then-City spokesperson Laura Alonso (today a City legislator) announced a fine regime of between AR$59,000 and AR$890,00 for anyone disturbing the contents of municipal containers. 

“The impunity is over for the ‘recyclers,’” Alonso wrote in a post on X.

Balbuena argues that the cartoneros' right to work is not absolute.

“You can exert your right to work as long as no third party might be threatened,” he said. “When you have traffic jammed because you have a cartonero searching for material, what you have is a right to circulate that is limited.”

Juan Ignacio Guajardo, who runs a cargo-tricycle workshop called Torky out of a co-working space in downtown Buenos Aires, has been building better carts for the cooperatives since 2019. Disassembled bicycle parts litter the garage space, which doubles as a ceramics studio.

Three hundred of his upgraded carts have been sold to cooperatives across Argentina, including 35 in the capital. He has iterated on the design 15 times based on feedback from workers.

The carts are leased to the cooperatives rather than given to individual workers because, Guajardo explained, a cart worth several months of wages might be sold rather than used.

City Hall, in his view, prefers the cartoneros as a permanent constituency in need of aid rather than an independent workforce with better tools.

Increasingly, it seems the workforce Guajardo builds for is not the workforce City Hall is buying a plan for.

 

Turning waste into data

At ISWA 2025, a World Congress on Solid Waste held at the Buenos Aires Convention Centre, Pablo Ader, the CEO of Urbetrack – the trade name of PAGUSTECH S.R.L., an Argentine telematics firm – delivered a keynote speech entitled: “The New Pulse of Urban Cleaning: Efficiency and Strategy with Data and New Technologies.” 

During it, Ader pitched a paradigm shift: from a traditional waste-management model “often reactive and based on fixed routes” to a “dynamic, intelligent and proactive” one. 

“Intuition and habit lose ground against the evidence that only data intelligence can offer,” he declared.

Gabriela Spector, Urbetrack’s product manager, then described the firm’s Buenos Aires operation. Among the products she presented was GIRE Presentismo, a QR-code attendance app designed to categorise each cartonero shift, escalate absences through an incident hierarchy, and feed directly into the city’s payment calculations for workers. 

GIRE has been in use since 2022 in the capital. Its attendance module records workers' shifts by QR code, while its weighing module logs the bags each cooperative collects on its route.

In July 2023, PAGUSTECH also won the contract to operate the city's Centro de Monitoreo de Higiene Urbana on its Urbetrack platform. The hub tracks the six private contractors that collect household waste and clean the streets. The contract came in at 2.93 billion pesos, nearly double the tender's 1.5 billion-peso reference budget. 

City Hall has since expanded it twice: by 78 percent in 2025, when the original two-year term expired, and by another 50 percent this March, to “guarantee the continuity and efficiency of the telemetry service.” 

Both the Urbetrack platform and the City agency that oversees it have been independently audited. In 2021, a review by the City’s Sindicatura General comptroller reviewed Urbetrack data and identified problems: 13.7 percent were duplicate discharge tickets, 45 negative-weight records, and 66.5 percent of user IDs that did not uniquely identify a physical person. User administration, the comptroller noted, was performed by the vendor itself. 

In a request for comment, PAGUSTECH disputed the duplicate-ticket finding, saying a single discharge ticket can legitimately consolidate waste from more than one route or vehicle. The negative-weight records, the company acknowledged, were detected during testing, and validations were later added to the platform to prevent them. Some of the non-unique user IDs, the company said, corresponded to system integrations rather than physical persons.

In 2026, the Auditoría General audited the Dirección General de Monitoreo y Sistemas, the office responsible for the vendor platforms including Urbetrack. Its Proyecto 10.25.02 found the directorate’s information governance “conceptual,” “lacking a formal mapping of data types, roles, and responsibilities,” and concluded “mechanisms currently linked to information security, access control, and data reliability” were insufficient. The audit’s 19 observations were directed at the city agency, not the platform. 

Urbetrack, contacted for comment, noted that the report “does not identify concrete deficiencies in the platform’s functionalities.”

Asked more broadly about its role, the company described itself as a “technology partner” that provides “tools and capabilities that support whatever service delivery model each client chooses to pursue.”

“We do not define policies, management structures, or the social frameworks within which operations take place,” it said. “Those decisions belong to the institutions.”

 

System under pressure

Nicolás, who goes by the nickname ‘Beno,’ learned the routes from his mother, Cristina Lescano, who founded El Ceibo, the first cartonero cooperative in the country. 

Cristina had come to Buenos Aires from the southern city of Trelew in 1989, at the peak of Argentina’s hyperinflation period, with her three sons. They lived in a casa tomada, an abandoned house occupied by squatters. She and a group of other women in the neighbourhood’s slums, none of them able to find work, went out to pull material from the rubbish. 

Beno worked the routes with her for years, left in 2012, and came back when she died. Today, he runs the cooperative. 

“I don’t see it as a job,” he said in an interview. “It is everything. The day I see it as a job, I won’t come back.” 

El Ceibo, which has collected recyclable waste in Palermo since the 1990s and has a sorting plant near Retiro, processes 450 tonnes of material a month and supports 270 families, say its leaders.

On a Tuesday in late May, Beno walked through the depot, a low building tucked behind a railway corridor. Pausing for the combined roar of a passing forklift and a descending jumbo jet, he gestured to two of the three sorting belts, which have been out of order since early in the month. The main baling press had been down since February.

Under the terms of El Ceibo’s contract, City Hall is responsible for maintaining the machinery. But Beno says the mechanics have stopped showing up.

Since the start of the year, El Ceibo has been paying for its own repairs out of operating cash. The cardboard piles up and the workers’ incentive payments, which are partly tied to recovered weight, shrink. 

“If something breaks down, I need to keep the business going,” he told me. “Because of the red tape and because of the government, I might as well pay for it myself. Because I need to keep the business going.”

El Ceibo is also facing eviction. 

The national government has begun moving to privatise the land the cooperative sits on, because of its proximity to the rail corridor. The cooperative has run door-to-door recovery across one of the city's wealthiest districts since 2003. Nothing has been announced about where the depot will go or what will replace the routes.

The federal authorities are looking at RUO’s cooperative site for the same reasons: rail-corridor adjacency and real-estate value. Gianni had believed the park and the community programming would give the cooperative a claim on the land. 

“This government prioritises real-estate speculation,” he said. “They don’t care about cultural, social, or ecological work.”

Officials across the City’s urban-hygiene chain, restructured this March under Cabinet Chief Gabriel Sánchez Zinny, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The Dirección General de Reciclado, the directorate through which the cartonero contracts run, declined to engage by email.

Amalia ends her route at another tacho, one of the more than 33,000 recycling containers the city has retrofitted with anti-vandal lids. 

A city sticker above the lid instructs residents: “TAKE OUT THE TRASH FROM 7 TO 9 PM. NOT BEFORE, NOT AFTER.” City Hall this year began promoting a programme encouraging residents to dispose of rubbish within the assigned two-hour window and sort their recyclables themselves. 

Schamber, who has read the City’s own compliance research, says residents are not doing as they’re asked. “As if complying with the time would sort out the inefficiencies of the system,” he said.

Amalia works the lid open anyway and begins sorting. 

“They are working with people that are writing the books,” said Yesica. “They are not with us. We are out in the street. They know the theory, but we know the practice.”

Buenos Aires is still deciding what the cartoneros should be. The City has decided, however, that it will not be up to the cartoneros.