Dismantling E-Waste in a warehouse. (Photo courtesy of Escrap)

2012 starts the final countdown for a decision to be made in Argentina about its electronic waste. Whilst last year the Minimum Premises for the Management of Electric and Electronic Waste (e-waste) Bill was passed in senate with 54 positive votes against one, it is now waiting to be formally discussed in Congress for it to be nationally instituted, after a meeting at the end of last year failed to achieve quorum.

This portion of urban solid waste, which includes not only mobile phones but also computers, batteries, television sets and other household appliances, is growing faster as people renew their electronics more often than ever. Only in the last year, one million computers, ten million mobile phones and 400 million batteries were discarded in Argentina. Each inhabitant throws away an average of 3kg of e-waste a year, totalling 120 thousand tonnes nationwide. This problem, however, is not unique to Argentina: worldwide, it is estimated that between 20 and 50 million tonnes of e-waste is discarded every year.

“We need a regulatory framework for environmental protection at national level and [we need to] especially regulate the management of electrical and electronic equipment waste,” said senator Daniel Filmus from Frente Para La Victoria, who originally presented the proposal in 2008.

The 28-page long proposed law suggests that producers be legally and financially responsible for the management of electronics that are no longer used by consumers, as well as the prohibition of toxic substances to be used in the manufacturing of new products. It also establishes the creation of a national infrastructure for disposal, storage, transport, reuse and recycling of electronic waste in coordination with the Secretary for Environment and Sustainable Development.

According to Escrap, a network of operators of e-waste and by-products industry in Argentina, only 24-32% of e-waste is currently recycled, reused or treated in any way in Argentina. So far, the rest of electronics have other final destinations.

Between 35-40% is kept in households, offices and warehouses, as people are unsure of what to do with them. The remainder, a further 30-35%, is buried in landfills or left in open rubbish piles. There is also what Escrap calls an “informal sector”, groups who will look in these piles for cables, plates, engines or plastic and then sell them in “informal markets”.  

An enormous amount of battery waste is generated. (Photo courtesy of Greenpeace by Martin Katz)

The dumping of e-waste is an environmental disaster. Most products are made up of metals and plastics that may take centuries to disintegrate, but also contain heavy metals and toxic substances which are damaging to our health and pollute the air, soil, rivers and water tables, such as lead, mercury, cadmium, hexavalent chromium, polybrominated biphenyls and polybrominateddiphenyl. According to a report released by Greenpeace, some of the possible effects of contamination are cancers, neurological toxicity (which may lead, for example, to memory loss) and damages to the circulatory, reproductive and nervous systems. Lead and mercury are particularly harmful to pregnant women and babies.

Greenpeace Argentina, who have been launching responsible e-waste treatment campaigns since 2007, have publicly expressed their discontentment with the lack of commitment from the government to reach a decision on the subject. “People talk a lot about how e-waste is the ‘garbage of the future’,” Yanina Rullo, the coordinator for the e-waste campaign at Greenpeace said. “It is not the future’s garbage: it is the garbage we already have now.”

She added that she thought the bill had “real financial potential” as it could generate jobs. So why is the government taking so long to reach a decision?

“Last year was a complicated one legislatively because of the national and the city elections and the lack of development of this law was because of that. These activities took four to five months from the regular statutory dynamics.”

However, she seems to think positively about the future ahead. “This is a bill which does not have serious opposition from the manufacturers, they have an understanding that this is something that will eventually happen as it did in Europe in 2003,” she explained. “Even the National Institute for Technological Industry [INTI] has supported and has been working on this issue for a few years now, as well as other environmental organisations. This has been a problem of political structure, which hopefully will be sorted this year.”

However, another critical point is the lack of recycling technology. In Argentina there are only around a dozen qualified operators who recycle between 2-15% of the e-waste, while the rest is exported to Europe where countries like France and Germany hold the technology to deal with more complex treatment of this kind of waste. With this law, the government will have to encourage the development of new recovery and treatment technologies in the country.

Gustavo Fernández Protomastro, the director of Escrap at a waste site (Photo courtesy of Escrap)

The subject of infrastructure, however, is relevant because although the government would be made responsible for establishing annual progressive goals in terms of the amount which is processed and also creating “reception centres” (to accommodate e-waste), the way these are managed, and how they will be able to cope with a sudden flow in e-waste, has not been clarified.

One organisation that is already working in the recycling front is Escrap, which is responsible for promoting the sustainable use of electronics from production to final disposal. They collect e-waste from companies and municipalities, separate their components (glass from metals, etc) and send them to smelters. The platelets (such as motherboards and keyboards) are sent to Europe to recover raw materials so as to be reused.

The director of Escrap, Gustavo Fernández Protomastro, does not seem concerned with the current lack of infrastructure. “This (bill) is certainly going to attract local and international investment to meet the demand.”

However, he was clear about Escrap’s goals. “What we want is for the government to establish a law which will speed up recycling and not the burying of products. It is easier to send the garbage for burial than recycling but it is not sustainable,” he said. “When people bury garbage, they don’t understand that there are those who they might be hurting or killing when they do it. We cannot bury forever. In the future, a battery will be recycled, not buried.”

Unlike Rullo, Fernández Protomastro is not concerned with the amount of time the government is taking with passing the law, arguing that “in Europe this decision took almost ten years”. He believes it is more important to create a law which is simple, coherent at both local and national level and within the understanding of both consumers and producers. This is because consumers need to be aware of returning their electronics to green spots and manufactures need to be prepared to cover the costs of collecting these goods and sending them to appropriate recycling and reusing centres such as Escrap.

“But it’s all a matter of cost-effectiveness. Unless money is involved, it is hard for people to do something about it. It’s like when buying beers, for example. If I return the used bottle it is cheaper the next time I buy beer. If there was some scheme like this with electronics, it would be easier for the law to work, because voluntarily it won’t. We humans do not understand the importance of caring for the environment, but it is necessary to manage that.”

Maybe 2012 will be the year when Argentina will do just that.

To find out what locals think of the issue, click here.

Image courtesy of Fundación Telefónica

Leandro Nuñez’s ‘Dispersiones’

While some artists breath new life into traditional media, others take advantage of the latest technology to drive their work into new territories. The 5th edition of the Premio MAMbA/Fundación Telefónica, which awards prizes for boundary breaking technological arts, proves that the marriage of art and the high-tech is more productive than ever in Argentina.

In the show, in which artists use materials from circuit boards and robots to interactive animation, the content stretches from the humorous through to the downright disturbing.

Some works are playful and funny, such as Maria Antolini’s film, ‘Gong’ in which tiny model people become overrun by real garden snails, more slimy than anything thought up in a fantasy monster movie.

Estanislao Florido’s ‘Proyecto Multiplayer’ includes a cartonero computer game set in the streets of Buenos Aires, featuring stray dogs, angry neighbours and belligerent policemen, all against a soundtrack of cumbia.

Other works, such as Leandro Nuñez’s ‘Dispersiones’ are more ambiguous. Consisting of circuit boards and wires attached to tiny cell-like squares, it emits hundreds of buzzing sounds that move about in a nervous communication. Standing in the midst of these machines, with little explanation of the artist’s methods and the sources of the sounds (do they come from the room you are standing in?), you feel as though someone might be performing experiments on you and begin to gain a lingering sense of the vulnerability of the human body.

Interactivity is the emphasis in other artworks, such as Julia Masvernat’s ‘Luciérnaga Sonora 2.0’, in which the viewer can manipulate sounds by choosing flickering shapes and colours from a computer screen. In another, the noises correspond with strange pac-man-like creatures crossed with surreal monsters, which sweep across the screen with nightmarish undertones.

Despite the productive effects of such works upon the imagination however, it is the first and the final works in the show, Iván Marino’s ‘Lingua’ and Jorge Castro’s ‘Proyecto~San R]’ that form the most disturbing and compelling dialogue of all – one which stays with you long after leaving the gallery.

While Antolini’s plastic people meet a sticky end at the hands of snails, and Florido’s cartonero gets caught by a policeman or hit by a falling pot, it really is ‘game over’ for the anonymous victim in ‘Lingua’. He is shown in real internet footage being beheaded, in a pool of pixelated (yet no less genuine) blood.

The fact that this piece leaves the rest of the show coloured by its irresolvable images is quite apt, since Marino’s very point seems to be the impossibility of digesting such a reality. Over the images of horror, random letters, typed and read out by a detached computer voice, form words that don’t make any sense, as if a stuttering reminder of the impotency of language to describe this event.

Image courtesy of Fundación Telefónica

Ivan Marino ‘Lingua’, Jorge Castro

Whilst Marino prompts reflection upon the fact that internet technology can bombard us with indigestible spectres of violence and terrorism, Jorge Castro’s ‘Proyecto~R]’ uses technology to retrieve something of the memory of those who have been victims of terror, in a life affirming retrieval of that which has been snatched out of reach.

Castro put sound recording equipment at the bottom of a lake in Córdoba where many victims of the last Argentine dictatorship are said to have met their fate. The resulting sounds, low and resonating, are projected in a darkened room accompanied by symbols and images of water. This sonic environment evokes a vast lonely expanse without humanity or language – a sense of drowning in a dark void. The piece uses technology to literally plumb the missing depths of collective memory.

Where images such as that used in ‘Lingua’ privilege the gory event over wider reason or context, leaving us ill equipped to contextualise their reality, Castro’s piece works, without spectacular methods, to reflect on a terrorism whose events were never thoroughly documented, and to give living, moving form to this absence.

Whilst his use of technology extends the power of the human body to perceive beyond its bounds, and thus symbolically reconnect with those we have lost, ‘Lingua’ looks at technology’s ability to create banal formulas and systems in the midst of senseless violence. Each letter in the work, chosen and read out by a computer, corresponds with a different instruction for the footage – to zoom in or out for example – forming a web of systematised sounds and images.

This conflation of violence and banal formulas recalls the tendency of oppressors to put in place arbitrary processes in order to systematise terror and disguise the culpability of those in control. Those that ‘disappeared’ people in the last Argentine dictatorship, for instance, named it ‘the process’, and undertook an arbitrary system of choosing who was to die next, calling the deaths ‘transfers’.

In looking at this creation of formulas and processes, Marino also touches upon a classic fear that is central to our thinking about technology – that banal systems will take over humans in a distopian nightmare, detaching the individual from the ability to make their own decisions, or obscuring the culpability of those in charge, who can always ‘blame the system’.

Image courtesy of Fundación Telefónica

Proyecto-San R]

Both Lingua and Proyecto~SanR] leave you profoundly affected, wordless and lacking an easy way to resolve what you have just witnessed. Technology in these works allows us to access sounds and images that we wouldn’t normally be able to perceive. But the fact that they may haunt us for hours, if not days after we leave the gallery, means that we are still left with the difficult work of making sense of them, something we can’t leave to the machines.

Arte y Nuevas Tecnologías runs until 16th May. Espacio Fundación Telefónica is open Tuesday to Sunday from 2pm-8.30pm at Arenales 1540. Entrance is free. For more information call 4333-1300, visit www.telefonica.com.ar/espacio, or email espaciofundacion@telefonica.com.ar