Landfill orchestra makes music from rubbish

Guardian News and Media/Asuncion

They race towards a rubbish truck as it empties its load at a vast landfill on the edge of the city, hauling away bin liners that overflow with household waste. Their hands are black with dirt and their faces are hidden by headscarves that protect them from the high sun.

An estimated 500 gancheros (recyclers) work at Cateura on the outskirts of Asuncion, where 1.5tns of rubbish are deposited daily, separating plastic and aluminium that they sell on for as little as £0.15 a bag.

Among the mounds of refuse, however, are used oven trays and paint pots. Cast aside by the 2mn residents of the capital of Paraguay, they are nonetheless highly valued by Nicolas Gomez, who picks them out to make violins, guitars and cellos.

Gomez, 48, was a carpenter and ganchero but now works for Favio Chavez, the conductor of Paraguay’s one and only landfill orchestra.

The Cateura Orchestra of Recycled Instruments is made up of 30 schoolchildren - the sons and daughters of recyclers - whose instruments are forged from the city’s rubbish. And while its members learned to play amid the flies and stench of Cateura, they are now receiving worldwide acclaim, culminating with a concert in Amsterdam in April that included Pachelbel’s Canon.

The project was born in 2006 when Chavez, 37, began work at the landfill as a technician, helping recyclers to classify refuse. But his passion for music took him home each weekend to the small town of Carapegua, 50 miles from Asuncion, to conduct a youth orchestra.

After he brought the group to Cateura to perform, the gancheros asked Chavez if he could teach music to their children, many of whom would spend afternoons playing in the rubbish as they waited for their parents to finish work.

But as the months passed, Chavez - a longtime fan of Les Luthiers, an Argentinian band that uses homemade instruments - realised the ever-growing number of children under his tutelage needed to practice at home if they were to progress.

“A violin is worth more than a recycler’s house,” says Chavez. “We couldn’t give a child a formal instrument as it would have put him in a difficult position. The family may have looked to sell or trade it.

“So we experimented with making them from the rubbish. We discovered which materials were most comfortable, which projected the right sound and which withstood the tension of the strings. It was fine to hand these out as they had no monetary value.”

Gomez travels three times a week to Cateura to dig out material. He shapes the metal oven trays with an electric saw to form the body of a violin and engineers cellos from oil barrels. The necks of his string instruments are sculpted from old strips of wood, called pale.

Now with the aid of colleagues, Chavez - who has been teaching music since he was 13 - uses the instruments to give classes to around 70 children and also directs weekly orchestra practice.

But he has a goal that goes beyond music. Chavez believes the mentality required to learn an instrument can be applied more widely to lift his pupils out of poverty.