Cartonero kids collect cardboard for a living

By Zoe Rudisill, 18, with contribution from Ben Harris, 10

In some respects, 10-year-old Florencia Palacios’ life in Argentina doesn’t seem much different from that of any American kid. She wakes up in her home in La Carcóva, an area near Buenos Aries, helps clean the house and goes to school. For fun, she plays with her friends and goes to the movies. Beyond this, her life begins to differ from the average American child.

Palacios goes into Buenos Aries with her family three or four times a week to collect paper and cardboard in the streets. In Argentina, people who do this are known as cartoneros. They sell the material to recyclers and make around two pesos, or four U.S. cents, per kilogram. Argentina’s economic crisis in 2001 left twenty-five per cent of the people unemployed. Many chose to collect and sell paper to survive. After five or six years of working as cartoneros, Palacios’ family was lucky that her father got a job as a truck driver for the city government.

Even though the family’s entire income doesn’t depend on collecting paper anymore, Palacios says that they still collect just as often, at an average of five hours at a time. Add this to a forty-minute train ride each way to Buenos Aries and back and Palacios’ family spends more than twenty-five hours a week collecting paper.

Palacios says that the extra money from her dad’s new job allows her family certain luxuries that many people take for granted, such as buying new clothing for the family.

Marquette native helps the children
Marquette native Jessica Koehs, twenty-seven, lives in Buenos Aries and visits the Palacios family frequently. Koehs works for the International Organization for Migration and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and coordinates the Research Project on Child Labor and Informal Recycling. She is a friend and mentor to Palacios and her four siblings.

8-18 Media interviewed Koehs during a recent visit to Marquette.

“We sometimes go to the movies but that’s usually when I bring her into the capitol and not when I’m out there (in La Carcóva). I talk to her mom or her dad and we usually just spend time in her house or walk around in the neighborhood,” Koehs said.

Koehs met the Palacios family through her volunteer work. In addition to her job, she spends many personal hours devoted to bettering the lives of cartonero families.

“I’ve started a tutoring program for a couple of little kids and another girl who’s about sixteen. Instead of those kids going out to look through the garbage, they stay with her at night and they study and play games with her,” Koehs said. “Also, I started a non-profit organization called Everyone Together. This project we’re working on right now is called Project Smile. We’re teaching people to brush their teeth because a lot of them have never even owned a toothbrush. It’s a small project, but it’s one thing that I’m with the kids a lot.”
Having worked with the children firsthand, Koehs knows how hard a cartonero child’s life can be.

“This is a very difficult life,” Koehs said. “A lot of times, if they’re really small they tend to still go to school. They’ll go to school in the morning from about seven o’clock to twelve. Then school gets out at twelve so their parents will pick them up, they’ll go on the cartoneros train into the city, and they’ll work between three and eight hours a day.”

Besides helping their parents collect the paper, cartonero children are helpful in generating more business for their parents.

“People on the streets feel bad for the children, so they tend to give more to families with kids than to families who are not with kids,” Koehs explained. “If the parents were being responsible and found a place to leave their children at home, people wouldn’t give them stuff. A lot of times if you see someone that’s in the street they say, ‘Oh, I have this bag of clothes I’ve been meaning to give away, but I’ll give it to you.’ If (they’re) with a child, you’re more likely to give it to them. A lot of the reason (parents bring their children) is to build up their clientele.”

As important as collecting paper is to these people’s lives, it is dangerous, especially for children at night when they do most of their collecting. Many children get stuck by needles or get cut on glass and metal in the trash and need stitches. In addition to these hazards, there are other threats lurking in the garbage.

"Different kinds of illnesses will pass through the garbage,” Koehs said. “There’s lots of lice, lots of other illnesses like right up in the head area where they itch a lot and they end up getting infected. Lots of different health problems are linked to cartoneros.”

Dangerous but dignified work
Even though it is a job with many dangers and no stable income, this is a trade that is dignified in it’s own way.

“A lot of them said, ‘Instead of stealing, I decided to go through the garbage,’ ” Koehs explained. “It’s actually a very dignified work in the way that the people choose to do it. They decide that instead of doing a lot of things that other people do when they don’t have any money — a lot of people steal because they don’t even have enough food to feed their children — they started going from house to house and asking for all the recyclable materials.”

Over the past few years, the situation has progressed so that entire families are out searching through the trash for whatever paper they can find that can be recycled. Both through her job and through her volunteer work, Koehs is trying to improve these people’s lives.

“What I’m trying to do work-wise is make things better for the cartonero children and their parents,” Koehs said. “This project was funded through UNICEF, so we focus mostly on kids, but I think it’s also really important to help their parents improve their lifestyles and their living so their children’s lives will also be better. The goal is to get the kids off the streets and having other opportunities.”

Not a bad job if it were safer
Koehs said that one way they are working to improve the cartonero lifestyles is to make the working conditions safer for the parents.

“This could be a great job if it was like a garbage man who has protective equipment and a cart that’s good for his back that’s not hurting him so much, and they wore gloves and a mask,” Koehs said. “Or you ask people to separate the garbage first in their houses. But you need large campaigns. You have twelve million people in Buenos Aires that need to learn to separate their garbage. I think that’s one of the goals, to get government and the local people and the schools to start teaching the population to separate the garbage and to dignify this work for adults for those who want to stay in it. And for those who don’t, to find another kind of work and continue their education.”

For Palacios, life is already improving. Her dreams of someone helping her family are coming true. With Koehs as her role model, Palacios said that when she grows up, she wants to work helping other people.