Casas hechas con basura
Translator: Gisela Giardino
Reviewer: Sebastian Betti
I haven’t thrown garbage in nine years.
And today I live in a house
built with garbage walls.
They’re no longer called garbage walls.
They’re called “my house walls”.
It’s called taking advantage
of what’s out there.
To be held accountable
of what I generate,
finding a new meaning
to things, giving them value.
It’s called being warm in winter
with minimal heat consumption,
efficient heating.
It’s called “I prevented a lot of waste
from poisoning the land
where I want to live.”
Let’s call things by their name.
Garbage is not shit.
Garbage is not waste.
Garbage is a resource.
It’s got value.
It’s very useful.
A while ago I had to build
a shed behind my house.
And since I didn’t have a dime,
what did I do?
I looked around and realized
that I was surrounded by resources.
And I grabbed my neighbors' garbage.
I had very responsible neighbors who
had their garbage separated and cleaned.
And I decided to build up the walls
of the shed with everything I found.
Glass bottles, plastic bottles.
Broken toys, broken buckets.
Everything I had available.
I love permaculture.
And I have in my mind all the time
its attitude principle
that goes, “the problem is the solution”.
I love that phrase.
It’s suitable for everything.
So I saw that there was
two pallets lying there,
I stuck two sticks
to hold them together,
I wired them, filled them
with garbage, mud and straw
and I plastered them with mud.
The technique I used is called quincha.
Everything I needed
was there available.
If I had to build up walls
with the regular technique
I would have used
about 10 bags of concrete,
bricks, sand, metal, and the logistics.
Lots of stuff.
And it ended up looking great.
At first sight no one noticed
that the core of the construction
was garbage.
That experience
was transformative for me.
That’s when I realized that
I wanted to work in construction.
And I specialized in
adobe plaster finishing.
And from there I went on to do
a whole house for someone.
From the foundations to the paint.
And then another, and another.
And today I’m a professional
in bioconstruction.
I made entire houses with
wooden structures,
green roof and adobe walls.
And one day it hit me,
as I was watching the mountain
from which they took
the mud I bought
to make the walls
of the houses I build,
was already a half of it, I went mad.
I went mad,
we had used half a mountain.
And that’s where I remembered my old shed.
And I decided to stop using
tons of mud,
water, bricks, concrete to build walls
and I found a system.
A mix of things.
A joint work between me and nature.
A wall system of plastic bottles,
garbage, plastered with mud.
And we started building
some really nice houses,
with a soul of garbage
and natural finishings.
And there I also realized that
not only we weren’t using
tons of natural resources,
but we were also recovering
a lot of materials
that were available
and that until then
were considered waste.
This all started out like the obsession
of an environmental activist.
And then it became my trade.
And today it is my job.
We build comfortable, efficient houses.
They’re warm in winter
and cool in summer.
And, above all, they have the purpose
of caring for the person and nature.
More and more people were interested
in these kind of houses,
and I started getting calls
for bigger projects.
We got to built a tea house
of 170 square metres
where we used 62,800 PET bottles.
A lot.
The equivalent of a block
full, full of bottles.
I wanted the construction with garbage
to be an environmental concept.
That everyone from any social background,
would like to adopt.
It started getting attention.
And all of a sudden, I found myself
building an office with this technique
for the president himself
inside the Olivos Residence.
Where I live, there is no
garbage collection service.
That’s why we got smarter.
Like when you live at your parents',
not cooking or paying for anything,
and only when you have to do it
you realize what it takes; like that.
So, I asked myself a little
science fiction question.
And I want to invite you all
to also ask yourselves:
What if the garbage truck didn’t exist?
What would you do?
What would my mom do?
What would my brother do,
who has three school-age kids?
What about their grandmothers
who love to give away
the infinite possibility
of toys on the market
with their infinite wrapping?
In how many days –
I think it would be days –
how many days it would take
to fill an apartment
with matter that, according to many,
is useless?
I hope we start taking charge
of our waste.
I hope we start thinking ourselves
as part of a system.
An integral system.
To cooperate with nature.
I know it’s hard to imagine ourselves
like that especially living in cities.
But don’t worry, because there are
a lot of strategies to do it.
The problem is the solution.
If the Earth is already exhausted
from giving, it’s time to give her back.
To contribute, to think:
what do I want to give Earth back?
What can I give for all this that I take?
That’s garbage for me.
An alternative, a resource.
We have it everywhere,
in front of us, a new resource.
Today is mainly plastic waste.
But tomorrow it may be another thing
that we have to reuse, who knows.
We can transform our way
of thinking and relating with garbage.
We can do things differently.
It’s possible.
Let’s take responsibility
for our own shit.
We can be alchemists and transform
that shit in our new gold.
When I was a girl, my mom loved
that I wear little dresses
combined with ribbons
that tied up my hair.
And there was a little dress,
turquoise, with elephants,
that matched a ribbon that
for me was like Disney.
It was a wide, long ribbon,
very turquoise. Spectacular.
I would see it and want to do
a thousand things with that ribbon.
But maternal protocol
indicated that it could only be use
that ribbon with that little dress,
that got hooked
in every tree in the world.
So one day I grabbed the ribbon,
stretched it and I cut it.
I felt really good. Really good.
That day, I released
the ribbon and myself.
And I confessed to my mom that
what I liked the most was making huts.
And a dress made me clumsy.
Today I recycle. I recycle myself.
I reuse. I transform. I transform myself.
Today I’m trying to make new sense.
Today I build houses instead of huts.
And that ribbon is a symbol
of letting go, of giving new meanings,
of changing the rules
of how we think and feel.
I haven’t thrown garbage in nine years.
And I love to see the speed
in which my mind was transformed.
My house is made of garbage.
And I keep calling it garbage
so people understand me.
But for me it’s an incredible material.
It’s a resource. It’s an opportunity.
Today the problem is the solution.
It’s in our hands the chance to regenerate
what we inadvertently destroyed first.
That which got out of hand.
It’s up to us to create the world
we so much say we want to see.
That’s why I want to bring up
this question again:
What would you do if the garbage truck
didn’t exist anymore?