B.A.Sur is an alternative, low environmental impact and high social impact model for waste recycling, designed for Buenos Aires and other towns within the same matters, like Sao Paulo and Montevideo.
Buenos Aires is a 13 mln inhabitants metropolis and it produces more than 5000 ton/day of rubbish. Since few years, there is a formal recyclable waste collection, but it’s really expensive, defective and badly managed, so almost all the collected rubbish ends up in landfills.
The ones who get involved in recycling in town are the “cartoneros”; they chooce indipendently to search all that could be re-saleable in the rubbish left on the streets, classifying the different materials and sealing them for few pesos. Since ‘90s, many of them formed some cooperatives, to gain rights and assistances. All together, they pick and sort about 550 ton/day of waste (11% of total amount).
B.A.Sur is a manual rubbish picking system, within two new objects - a public trash can and a handcart -, within features of low-costs, eco-susteinability in their whole life-cycle and ergonomics of use. The urban area will be separated in harvest zone, each one sized and committed to a different cooperative. In a zone, every day cartoneros will cover fixed routes and empty a fixed number of trash cans in the “CENTRO VERDE” (green point), where rubbish is classified.
The objects designed are:
- a public 2 compartments recycling bin (HDPE, recycled and recyclable), with the roto-moulding technology. The only additional elements are two caps (HDPE), the aluminium (recycled and recyclable) parts of the opening mechanism and two bottom hooks. The bin has two compartments, for wet and dry waste; only dry waste can be divided in different materials and directed to recycle.
- An aluminium handcart, designed to manually lift and carry away the can for emptying; it’s equipped with two fixed front wheels and a rear smaller pivot wheel. To lift off the bin, the picker has to push the handcart towards it and the bin will automatically set on the handcart, being hooked up.
In this way the recycling will be developed in the town; job qualities and life conditions will increase for cartoneros, a virtuous circle and a recycling mentality will start, the environmental quality of the town will be improved. For all these reasons, I think this design can be showed in socialdesignsite.com.
