Trashed: The Politics of Waste in Buenos Aires, 1900–30

This paper examines the politics of waste and the organization of municipal trash collection in Buenos Aires during the first three decades of the twentieth century. At the time of Argentina’s centennial celebrations in 1910, Buenos Aires residents discarded approximately 1.5 million pounds of domestic garbage per day. Most of that waste was burned in large open-air dumps located on the borders of the ever-expanding city, which attracted scavenger communities and the ire of city leaders and elite residents. Confronted with Buenos Aires’ growing trash, municipal officials linked the management of the city’s swelling garbage to public health and security while attempting to eradicate informal trash-picking communities. At the same time, a generation of sanitation experts and urban engineers began to advocate for the installation of large-scale incinerators throughout the city and in apartment dwellings to solve Buenos Aires’ waste problems. By the late 1920s, urban trash infrastructures had been firmly established. But the growth of Greater Buenos Aires, with its burgeoning industrial complexes and residential enclaves, raised new concerns about garbage in the metropolitan region and anxieties about the ideal city resident. Drawing on municipal records, press, and literature, the paper examines waste’s power to shape urban experience during an era of migration, economic expansion, and rapid population growth. As the presentation demonstrates, trash – what residents discarded, who collected it, and where it ended up – proved central to the making of Buenos Aires into a modern city.