Arqueologia do lixo de Belo Horizonte/MG em meados da década 1970 : o aterro da cidade indica um passado que não passa, vidas breves e fragmentos duráveis.

Abstract

The objective of this thesis was to broaden understandings about the multiple identities and multiple places that garbage and waste occupy in landscapes and the way they influence and shape our thoughts and lifestyles. Starting from the assumption that garbage/waste holds volatile and tangible identities only if we consider its cultural context and place of deposition, we propose to think of this matter as holding partial capacities to answer about what is the society we live in. The city of Belo Horizonte, in Minas Gerais, and its public landfill - located at km 531 of BR-040 - which functioned as a storage place for the city's discards, between 1975 and 2007 - were the places studied, in the perspective of broadening understandings about garbage and waste. To this end, we carried out two digging, applying the method of searching directly in the garbage, digging, cleaning the remains of the remains, handling them, smelling its smells, facing its sanitary health risks. The BR-040 landfill is considered, in this research, as a synthesis landscape of Belo Horizonte. When analyzing parts of this waste, we identified routine habits, some transformations of contexts, in the city of Belo Horizonte - especially from rural to urban contexts - and an accelerated temporality, in terms of the uses of raw materials, consumption and disposal. The analyzed fragments, and even the discarded ones, indicated that there is everything in the trash, but that not everything is in the trash. Large economic corporations resist the changes of Capitalism and insist, with their resistant brands, found in the diggings, in an almost intact state: Coca-Cola, Bayer, Avon, L'Óreal, NIVEA, Danone, Itambé, Bombril, Novalgina and others. The exhumed fragments showed a productive system that replaces production sites and land uses, while investing in the marketing of cleanliness, beauty, health and happiness, without caring about the waste that their promises and created needs generate. The possible “solutions” for waste are thus in complementary and dynamic contexts, which imply interactions between generators, distributors, consumers, recyclers and governments. Reviewing the pattern of large-scale production, predominant raw materials, forms of disposal and landfill confinement favors an understanding of the cultural amnesia resulting from a very rapid production, consumption and disposal process. All materials exhumed in the diggings indicated excesses in production and disposal durability and resistance. They are records of a past that does not pass.