From Trash To Tunes

Meet The Recycled Orchestra

- Sonja Cole

Musicians in the London Philharmonic Orchestra play expensive instruments crafted from the finest materials. But in a slum in Cateura, Paraguay, in South America, an orchestra plays instruments made out of materials recycled from the trash. Their name is Orquesta de Reciclados (the Recycled Orchestra), and they perform for audiences all over the world. Cateura is now famous as the home of the Recycled Orchestra. These musicians create beautiful music out of garbage.

The musicians are all children and teens living in Cateura, a very poor community on the edge of the largest landfill in Paraguay. It’s not far from the capital city, Asunción. Every day, about 3 million pounds (1.3 million kg) of trash gets dumped in the Cateura landfill. The water supply is dangerously polluted from all the garbage. On rainy days, the town floods with dirty water. It is literally a sea of trash!

Most people who live in Cateura work as “trash pickers.” They collect recyclable materials from the landfill and sell the items for money. They look for glass bottles, aluminum cans, cardboard, or plastic. They can sell one pound of cardboard for five cents. A pound of plastic is worth ten cents. Children aren’t supposed to work in the landfill, but some do anyway because their families need their help.

Favio Chávez is an environmental engineer who went to Cateura to teach the gancheros (recyclers) about recycling safety. A musician himself, he saw kids in the landfill and decided to teach music lessons. He taught for three hours outside, even in the pouring rain or intense heat. “It was very difficult because we had no place to rehearse, and we had to teach in the same place where the parents were working in the trash,” said Chávez.