Figure II.1 View of the COOPAMARE facility, located under viaduct Paul VI in Pinheiros/São Paulo, November 2011, photo by the author.
Figure II.1 View of the COOPAMARE facility, located under viaduct Paul VI in Pinheiros/São Paulo, November 2011, photo by the author.
When archaeologist Bill Rathje and his team of “garbologists” excavated landfills to study contemporary culture, they developed methods to quantify and classify discarded scraps, packaging materials, and newspapers. They determined the age of landfill strata using a taxonomy of beer can ring-tabs, which, until manufacturers replaced them with nondetachable rings, varied in design according to manufacturer and production date (Rathje and Murphy 2001).
Surprisingly, they found that the results of consumer behavior surveys did not match the collected evidence. What people say they throw away turns out to be different from what they actually throw away. These findings were often counterintuitive. Rising meat prices, for example, led people to purchase more meat, leading Rathje to conjecture that people tend to stockpile items when prices go up, but they fail to consume and preserve their purchases.
The experiment conducted by Rathje’s team shows how data collected from waste touches on the most private aspects of residents’ lives—material circumstances, ages, preferences and social codes, health, and even pets. Similar landfill excavations have played a role in writing a chapter of video game history by unearthing a batch of rare game cartridges from a site in New Mexico where the company Atari buried its unsold products (Guins 2014). They have offered insights into the musical tastes of the Grateful Dead’s Chosen Family commune in California (Parkman 2014). The term “garbology” has also been claimed by gonzo-journalist Al Weberman, who retrieved garbage bags from Bob Dylan’s Greenwich Village townhouse and publicized his analysis of their contents (Weberman 1980).
Like garbologists, cities and waste management firms periodically separate a representative truckload of waste, sort and classify the discards, and measure humidity and weight, paying particular attention to materials such as asbestos or electronic waste. The Spanish art collective Basurama conducts such waste audits as public events, where participants are invited to help separate and classify two tons of garbage. Similar information about waste composition is generated as a byproduct of sorting procedures in recovery facilities.
Despite their different purposes and scope, the practices of the artist Olbrich, the archaeologist Rathje, the activist Weberman, and the waste composition studies conducted by local governments share many similarities. However, only the latter are a formal part of the waste system.
So far in this book, I have emphasized the lack of legibility of waste systems as a way to reverse-engineer an existing, formally planned system. In part II, I focus on informal systems and how the different actors involved in these systems produce legibility, and how these practices of legibility affect the services and practices they are designed to monitor. The following case study reflects upon the results of a participatory design experiment with the goal of developing a system for documenting the routes and activities of informal waste collection and recycling. In the context of efforts by Brazilian governments to formalize waste pickers, this section argues that formalization not only depends on new systems of legibility, but that producing legibility is an act of formalization in itself.
Brazil has a history of waste picker unionization and a strong cooperative movement, making the country a hotbed for experiments integrating waste pickers into the formal waste management system (Medina 2010). In 2010, Brazil was the first country to pass national legislation that recognizes the profession of waste pickers and formally integrated them into the waste management system. While promising new opportunities, the legal recognition of waste pickers comes with obligations of professionalization, including monitoring and data collection requirements that recycling cooperatives often struggle to meet.
The Trash Track experiment we conducted in Seattle demonstrated how even a modern, integrated waste management approach leaves a level of uncertainty about the fate of discarded materials. If a modern waste system turns out not to be entirely legible, one wonders what a similar experiment would reveal in places where waste management happens in mostly informal ways. In the Forage Tracker experiment described in chapter 4, my team from MIT used location-based technologies to analyze practices in Brazil’s informal system of recycling.
The idea began when a colleague from the University of São Paulo, Professor Maria Cecilia Loschiavo dos Santos, philosopher, and advocate for a local waste picker cooperative, expressed a particular concern. She feared that local governments and policy makers were not aware of the full extent of services that the co-ops provided for their communities due to the invisible and tacit nature of their work. Together we hypothesized that mapping material collection along with spatial decisions and service areas would make the cooperatives more visible and benefit their negotiations with other actors in the waste sector.
The Forage Tracker project was conducted between 2011 and 2014 by Senseable City Lab researcher David Lee and myself in partnership with the University of São Paulo, the Fundação Joaquim Nabuco, and other local partners. The project shared many similarities with Trash Track, as it also involved tracing the movement of discarded materials through the waste system. In this case, however, the routes of waste were not determined by logistic schemes, but by the decisions and experience of individuals. Understanding these decisions and their implications was the central concern. Unlike the Trash Track experiment in Seattle in which location sensing served as a method of passive observation, Forage Tracker, therefore, relied on location-based media as a method for active documentation, in which the workers of the cooperative are in charge. If Trash Track stands for approaches that use large-scale deployments of urban sensors to collect generic data, then Forage Tracker represents smaller, artisanal approaches to data collection that are concerned with the local scale and tailored for a particular group of users. Forage Tracker is one among several projects that have chosen such an approach. Later work that follows a similar approach in the informal waste space includes the Wecyclers project in Nigeria that uses local data to manage a recycling collection system with a fleet of cargo bikes, or Kabadiwalla Connect, an Indian initiative using smartphone apps to map material sources for informal collectors and scrap-shop owners. In all of these initiatives, the amount of data collected and their generalizability and robustness are secondary to the concern about how data correspond with the local practices of the people who use them.