The current operational framework follows a traditional waste management sequence: collection, transport, limited sorting, and final disposal. Waste arrives at the San Felipe facility before transfer to the Overo Pozo site for sanitary landfill. The system requires sustained investment in trucks, fuel, heavy machinery, compaction equipment, cell maintenance, environmental monitoring, and leachate treatment. Municipal budgets absorb escalating costs tied to moving and burying waste rather than extracting value from it.
Advanced municipal systems in other regions have shifted toward circular economy models that treat waste as a feedstock. Organic fractions can undergo biodigestion to produce biogas, which serves as fuel for electricity generation, industrial heating, or conversion into biomethane as a natural gas substitute. Dry recyclables including cardboard, plastics, metals, and glass re-enter production cycles, while non-recyclable rejects become refuse-derived fuel for controlled industrial combustion.
Tucumán’s landfill-centric approach carries a dual cost structure. Direct expenses cover collection, haulage, operation, and disposal. Opportunity costs accumulate through foregone energy generation, unrealized material recovery, absent green employment, and accelerated consumption of landfill capacity. Each ton buried eliminates potential revenue streams and shortens the relleno sanitario’s operational lifespan.
The metropolitan scale of nearly 1,000 daily tons provides sufficient feedstock volume to support valorization infrastructure. The gap between Tucumán’s burial-focused system and energy recovery models adopted elsewhere underscores a strategic question for Argentine secondary cities: whether waste management budgets will continue funding disposal or pivot toward systems that convert residuals into saleable energy and reclaimed materials. The consortium’s tonnage data exposes the magnitude of untapped organic and combustible fractions currently directed to landfill cells.
This article was curated and published as part of our South American energy market coverage.
