The paradox of waste : Rio de Janeiro’s Praça XV flea market

Abstract

At the end of each day, very little rubbish remains on the streets of Rio de Janeiro's affluent and middle-class suburbs. Through the night and early morning, phalanxes of sanitation workers and scavengers, working in both the informal and formal economies, sort and clean up much of it. Some of that rubbish is handpicked and reclassified as waste, and bound for secondary markets where it can be sold and bought anew (Coletta 2010). Informal and formal second-hand or 'flea' markets are a node within a globally ubiquitous network of secondary economies that generates valuable social, economic, and material infrastructure in cities (Evers and Seale 2014; UNHabitat 2010)