Thousands of plastic containers, hundreds of used tires or dozens of pallets are garbage, aren't they? The fact is that not everything that is discarded has to have ceased to have a use, although it may seem that way.

Questioning the possibilities of everything we throw away every day, Basurama started the RUS (Solid Urban Waste) project in 2007, an active reflection on consumption and reuse. With a critical view that makes visible the different problems linked to the waste cycles, RUS becomes, above all, a proactive working tool from which to carry out interventions in degraded public spaces. And it is precisely these actions that are at the heart of the project, making RUS a place of encounter and exchange, capable of generating work networks between different local agents.

Throughout the five cross-cutting articles and the ten interventions presented - developed between 2008 and 2010 in nine South American countries - any time is a good time to reflect on cooperative work, appropriate technologies, reuse versus recycling or the importance of informal garbage collectors. In this way, the volume becomes a sort of Lonely Planet of garbage, a real practical manual from which to pull the thread and discover the work of agents and collectives from all over South America.

And as if that were not enough, all the content is presented under Creative Commons 3.0 license and in two formats: paper and downloadable in pdf from this link.