When Materials Speak: Design Practices in a Recycling Cooperative

Abstract

This ethnographic work explores how a recycling cooperative in La Matanza (Argentina) develops design practices that reimagine its relationship with the materials it engages with. Focusing on the revalorisation of expanded polystyrene (EPS) – a material commonly discarded by the local industry – this study analyses how waste pickers transform it into new forms of material life. In this process, the ways of naming it also shift: EPS becomes ‘snow’ or ‘pearls’ – terms filled with evocative power that expand the possibilities of imagining new destinies and meanings for recycled matter.  

Far from reproducing extractivist logics, their experimentation creates sensitive and collective methodologies where EPS ceases to be waste and becomes an active agent in building relationships, knowledge and practices. This approach argues that waste pickers generate a transformative form of design through experimentation and innovation with materials lacking market value. This design not only challenges the hegemonic model but also enables the participation of others, incorporating our bodies, perspectives, knowledges and sensibilities. What unfolds is a creative force that fosters both connection and divergence with dominant design methodologies and with the academics who participate in and/or observe these processes. These nuances allow us to (dis)encounter each other: to understand other ontologies, to reflect on our own, and to open ourselves to listening to what materials have to tell us.