The recycler and the truck
A coworking visit surfaces a systems lesson about recycling, and about where solutions have to come from. In Brazil, recycling is top-down: every house has colored bins, and a green truck comes twice a week for paper, glass, and metal, the whole thing organized by the municipality. In Colombia, at least in Chía, there's no such structure, just recicladores, people who live off collecting plastic, glass, and metal and selling it by weight at a recycling center. Juan's point is that the real solution has to come from above, from the government or the town hall, not from individuals, because you can sort your own trash perfectly and the garbage truck still takes it all, so it never reaches the recycler. The coworking's founders are building an app to connect recyclers with users as a partial patch, the best available stopgap, but it's a patch on a gap that only top-down structure can actually close. Some problems can't be fixed one conscientious household at a time.
// trace: where this idea came from
- ↳ video diary @ 10:17 (en Brasil el reciclaje es top-down (caniquitas de colores, camión verde 2x/semana); en Colombia son recicladores individuales)
- ↳ video diary @ 10:51 (la solución real viene de arriba, del gobierno, no una solución individual)
- ↳ Entry 258-1: The safe condo (el mismo instinto de que el sistema debería venir bien hecho desde arriba)
A coworking visit surfaces a systems lesson, about recycling and about where solutions have to come from. In Brazil, where Julia grew up, recycling is top-down: every house has colored bins, and a green truck comes twice a week for paper, glass, and metal, the whole thing organized by the municipality, so all you do is drop the right bag in the right bin ▸ 10:17. In Colombia, at least in Chía, there’s no such structure, only recicladores, people who live off collecting plastic, glass, and metal and selling it by weight at a recycling center.
el reciclaje individual es un parche; la solución real viene de arriba →
Juan’s point is that the real fix has to come from above, from the government or the town hall, not from individuals, and the reason is mechanical: you can sort your own trash perfectly, but the garbage truck still hauls it all away together, so your careful sorting never reaches the recycler ▸ 10:51. The coworking’s founders are building an app to connect recyclers with users, a partial patch, the best available stopgap while the structure that should exist doesn’t. But it stays a patch, because some problems can’t be solved one conscientious household at a time; when the pipe downstream mixes everything back together, individual virtue is wasted effort, and only the system can be the answer…
// continued in
no entry has continued this idea yet: the arc is still open