"Quando o muro separa, uma ponte une": contradições, realidades objetivas, totalidades e mediações geográficas e tecnológicas para o mercado de recicláveis no estado da Bahia

Abstract

This thesis is a study of the mismatches of the project undertaken by the extinct OSCIP PANGEA - Center for Socioenvironmental Studies - with Cata Bahia Network (CBN), for the institution of an innovative process in the recycling segment in the state: converting three of its twenty cooperatives in units that functioned as small industrial plants for the transformation of plastic and cardboard into two consumer goods: boxes and bottles. However, the project was not successful, and two elements that caused this failure caught our attention: the small number of recyclable materials that arrived at the pilot cooperative in Salvador, which were unable to make the machines work at an “industrial pace”, and the lack of infrastructure of these cooperatives to receive the equipment. To understand this geoeconomic process, Karl Marx's dialectical historical materialism was used as a method, operationalizing the examination of the RCB project in the light of four categories: contradiction, as a criticism of the project's planning and proposal for its overcoming and continuity; the analysis regarding the objective reality of the machinery and the technological model that were not by the productive capacity of the Network; the concrete totality, or the lack thereof, through the parts of the project not being considered as a whole; and the need for a new geographical and technological mediation process that would celebrate the objective reality and the concrete totality of both the place and the technological model chosen to act in this category. For the analysis of the narrated context, the examination of the "desire" of this undertaking to work through a process of territorialization of the Network was set aside, that is, its spatialization in the territory of the state, presided over by a process of territorial governance based on the horizontality as the Network was constituted; and, as these objectives were not achieved, we started to work with the “reality” left by this process, using the place category as a new planning instrument, both for the CBN and for the highlighted activity. To this particular dynamics of the recyclables market in a respective place, he interpreted it as a lócus economicus, a reading of the following process: instead of worrying about planning for the territory, which, economically, would result in the elaboration of products already saturated in this market, as in the case of the CBN, when changing the category territory for the place, this locus would be constituted by the synergy between the sociability present in the demands of a relative community and the offer that the cooperatives of this sector of the economy have to bring to it in the face of equipment, or technological model, that meets such needs in light of its productive condition. This, in turn, would converge in the development of a Distinct Space, a theoretical-conceptual conception that differentiates the organization of the recycling sector in the state by other companies in the field, given the characteristics that this process brings with it: it’s social relations, economic, environmental and technological “localized”, the result of what has been called geographical