Argentina’s Recycling Crisis Deepens as Prices Drop and Waste Mounts

LA MATANZA, BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA — Under a punishing sun, Gabriela Villalba plunges her hands into a mountain of waste. She launches bottles, paper and cardboard into their designated spots with practiced precision.

Villalba works at the Construyendo Desde Abajo cooperative recycling plant. Behind her stands an idle conveyor belt — a machine that once promised to modernize the plant’s operation but now collects dust, lacking the minimum five workers needed to operate it. Many people have left, Villalba says, because the work no longer pays enough.

Argentina’s recycling system is crumbling. Worker-owned cooperatives collect, sort, weigh and package recyclable materials, which they sell to the companies that recycle them. But the country began importing virgin paper and cardboard for recycling in mid-2024, and in less than a year, the prices of recyclables fell dramatically. Between January 2024 and January this year, the price per kilo of cardboard dropped by 55%, scrap metal by 70%, and glass by 68%.

A third of cooperatives have closed. Half of their workers, including cartoneros — street-level waste-pickers who once formed the backbone of Argentina’s recycling ecosystem — have abandoned their carts entirely. According to the Federación Argentina de Cartoneros, Carreros y Recicladores, a national federation of cartoneros, the number of people working in recycling cooperatives shrunk from 18,000 in 2023 to 10,000 in January this year.

“I was forced to leave. I went from earning 40,000 to 20,000 pesos a day. It doesn’t let me eat in peace anymore,” says Nelson Villasboa, who recently delivered his last load of cardboard.

To complicate matters, the government published a decree on Jan. 3 to deregulate the export and import of nonhazardous recoverable waste. This decree effectively ended two significant restrictions: a 16-year ban on scrap metal exports and a two-year ban on plastic exports. The bans were designed to ensure that local industries maintained priority access to these valuable materials. The government claims the move will help lower production costs for small and medium-sized companies. During a talk in Washington, D.C. on Feb. 21, President Javier Milei told the Inter-American Development Bank that his administration eliminated scrap metal export restrictions, benefiting many and finally setting a market price on scrap. The decree’s impacts aren’t yet clear, but Jorge Santkovsky, from electronic waste company Scrap & Rezagos, is optimistic. He believes exports may encourage the recovery of materials that are not typically recycled in Argentina because it’s not lucrative.

“Metal is worth a lot abroad,” he says, “but here it’s thrown away due to its low price.”

Despite Santkovsky’s optimism, with fewer waste-pickers on the streets, more recyclable materials end up in landfills or open dumps. And once recyclables are mixed with waste, very little can be recovered, says Leonardo Maceiras, the operations manager of Coordinación Ecológica Área Metropolitana Sociedad del Estado, the company that manages urban solid waste in the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires.

Argentina’s waste management operates on parallel tracks: a formal system in which private companies collect household garbage, and an informal network in which self-employed cartoneros (in English, “cardboard people”) handle most recycling. While municipalities oversee both, because they do not have sufficient resources to better manage recyclables, they prioritize funding for garbage collection over recycling programs, says Mariana Saidón, a specialist in environmental economics and waste management.

Recycling is left to the cartoneros.

Municipality officials did not respond to requests for comment.

Cartoneros largely emerged during Argentina’s 2001 economic crisis, which thrust many into extreme poverty. Many were scavenging through garbage anyway, to find food. As the middle class crumbled, many once-comfortable families found themselves joining the ranks of urban waste-pickers.

The global waste trade historically enabled countries to recycle materials they couldn’t process domestically. However, the last decade has seen increasing restrictions worldwide. China, once a major recipient of plastic waste, had banned all solid waste imports by 2021, and countries like India and Thailand recently prohibited plastic waste imports to combat pollution.

Argentina’s January decree moves in the opposite direction. Importers need only submit affidavits declaring waste as nonhazardous, and environmental authorities have just 10 days to object before automatic approval.

In a press release, the Secretariat of Industry and Commerce, which is in charge of implementing the decree, together with the Sub-secretariat of Environment, explained that the decree significantly streamlines the import and export of recyclables like paper, cardboard, metal and glass. Companies will no longer need to prove local material unavailability or go through extensive bureaucratic procedures — marking a substantial change in how the recyclable-material trade will be conducted.

“If there is no control, anything can come in. There is a risk of all kinds of materials entering, with traces of contamination,” says Héctor Manuel González of Asociación Civil Basura Cero, an e-waste recycling organization.

What worries him is that this incoming scrap may be part of machinery that once contained some highly polluting liquid, gas or solid, such as heavy metals.

The Sub-secretariat of Environment in the Secretariat of Tourism, Environment and Sports, which is the body responsible for reviewing these affidavits, did not respond to Global Press Journal’s requests for comment.

In the meantime, recyclables increasingly litter the streets.

“You can still see bottles on the street from the [Christmas] holidays that in the past didn’t last even two days,” says Matías Capoblanco, a representative of the federation of cartoneros.

And the cartoneros say they see no way out. Antonio Sosa, a cartonero, says he made 40,000 Argentine pesos (US$38) per load of recyclables a year ago. Now, each load is worth just 7,000 pesos (US$7).

“It’s going from bad to worse,” he says.