The B side of social innovation. Grassroots technologies development and waste picker cooperatives in Greater Buenos Aires (Argentina)

CARENZO SEBASTIAN

Helisnborg

Workshop; Opening the Bin: new perspectives on waste, culture and society; 2017

Lund Universitet

This paper draws on an ongoing collaborative ethnographic research developed with Reciclando Sueños a wastepicker´s cooperative located in Greater Buenos Aires. This collective experience Currently has been developing experimentation skills for recycling materials recovered from households and industrial locations, managing to develop a sort of "verticalization" of its production process. In addition, they have focused its experimental praxis on post consumer plastic materials that lacks a market to be commercialized, and therefore, are buried in landfills. Drawing on an ethnographic analysis of this active experimental work I will focus on three related analysis lines:In the first place, my current reflection raises an uncomfortable question: which actors are legitimately qualified to develop practices of technological innovation in the field of waste management in our contemporary urban societies? This issue becomes especially relevant if one consider that this creative/experimental praxis is carried out by "cartoneros" (wastepickers) who lacks the symbolic, economic and technical capitals required to socially legitimate these competences.Secondly, my aim is to challenge the linear relationship between "value adding" and "technological development" when analyzing the situation of informal recycling. Specifically I discuss the top-down, linear and deterministic approaches to adress social innovation issues that are promoted either from gubermental and non-gubernmental institutions.Finally, a third reflection addresses the limits of this practice of innovation that does not follow established bureaucratic and procedural standards. Departing from the notion of epistemic (in)justice, initially proposed by Miranda Fricker (2008), I draw a critical reflection on the requirement of transparency, as a key issue that shapes innovation skills aimed at waste management, and defines what is still thinkable and (un)thinkable in this field.