ReciclARTE

Photos and interviews with Colombian recicladores - people, who is collecting, sorting and selling rubbish from the streets. With pandemic their number started to grow up very fast.

After the quarantine started in Colombia in March 2020, a lot of people lost their jobs and had to accept any new opportunities they could find. One of the most available jobs now, aside from delivering various goods, is sorting and recycling rubbish in the city. Recicladores - how they are called in Spanish - move through the city with their huge handcarts (each cart can weigh about 60 kg) and try to find cardboard, metals, plastics and other elements in the garbage, which can be sold later to special areas. This activity has been part of Colombian urban past for over 30 years, when the carts were pulled by horses and the carts themselves were known as zorras, but nowadays it is more popular and competitive. 

With journalist Claudia Del Castillo we decided to make the project about recicladores as their numbers in Bogotá grew day by day and their presence became visible. We wanted to show how they work and deal with dangers in the city, what are the hardest parts of their labour and to which jobs they would love to change when the pandemic is finally over. 

Most of the recicladores are Venezuelan migrants, who came to Colombia during the last 2-3 years. After the deep economic crisis in Venezuela, they had to flee their country, looking for new homes. Some of the migrants came to

Colombia by bus, others by foot, with their children on their shoulders and without a clear idea of what they are going to do in a new country and with a new life. If at home they had simple, not high qualified jobs, it’s a very low chance to find

a good vacancy here. Colombia now hosts around 1.8 million Venezuelan migrants and refugees and thousands of people still enter the country every day through various legal and illegal entry points. 

Another visible point, which appeared in interviews, is drugs and its influence on people’s life. Some heroes of this project lost everything they had because of addiction: families, houses, better jobs. Some could not do any other activities: recycling and drugs are very connected for them from a young age.   

ReciclARTE means in Spanish, “to recycle oneself, to change into something new”. We truly hope that the play of words in Spanish, between what it means to work in such a hard task and the act of changing a life,

is well understood by all those who see our work.