Scrap Stories: Survival and Art from the Shadows of Barcelona

Picking through bins and pushing shopping carts overflowing with a mishmash of metal and other junk through Barcelona's Poblenou district, scrap-pickers are a common sight these days. Who are these people, and what stories do they have to tell? A closer look reveals dynamics of marginalization, stigma, migration, and systemic reliance on the most exploited maneuvering along the fringes of legality. 

In order to better understand this phenomenon, insights were drawn from an interview with Daniele Vico, a PhD researcher at the University of Barcelona focusing on the socio-metabolic analysis of informal recycling in European and Global South cities, as well as from on-the-ground conversations with chatarreros and direct field observations in Barcelona. Many of these insights can also be found here.

A chatarrero searches for scrap metal in Barcelona, pushing his self-made cart through the streets for hours at a time.

Living on the Edge

Locally known as chatarreros, the scrap-pickers’ trade is a very straightforward, yet insecure and physically demanding occupation. Discarded metal is collected and sold at local depots known as chatarrerías. These small-time logistical nodes form the first link in a larger chain of processing. Most collectors avoid direct interaction with larger recycling companies, which demand tax IDs and permits. As the front line of Barcelona’s urban recycling system, some chatarrerías, especially the larger ones, are formally recognized businesses, while many of the smaller ones continue to operate informally. It is only at the larger collection sites, where the chaterreros findings enter legal branches of the industry. The absence of legal status at base level doesn’t diminish scrap-picking's popularity. On the contrary, around 3000 chatarreros are estimated to work within Barcelona in various neighbourhoods.

Often homeless or living in squats, scrap workers operate in what researchers describe as a “gray zone”: neither legal nor outright illegal. Technically, their work is unauthorized, since municipal waste is considered public property. In day-to-day reality, the city administration turns a blind eye on them. Public opinion towards chatarreros is ambivalent. While some residents deliberately leave scrap metal at their doorsteps, pickers are also repeatedly met with suspicion. It is a rough line of work to be in. Scrap-picking women are rare, likely due to the fact that most migrants from Sub-Saharan Africa are young men, combined with the intense physical demands and gender-specific risks of working on the streets. Yet despite all the danger and discomfort, the chatarreros role is critical to any local recycling business. Some estimates accredited scrap metal pickers with supplying up to half of Catalonia’s scrap metal.

The Price of Being Informal

Barcelona's rattling shopping carts offer a cheap waste management solution. Yet, the municipality neither pays nor protects those pushing them. The business’s informal nature offers at least some income to those lacking the paperwork necessary to enter the formal labor market. But where formal oversight is absent and legal status is murky, exploitation is never far. It is mostly migrants from Sub-Saharan Africa—especially Senegal—who endure long workdays under precarious conditions. All for the prospect of roughly two euros an hour. Right now, it is the strenuous labor of the stranded and forgotten that is keeping Barcelona’s sustainability goals alive. Despite this massive ecological contribution, these workers are ignored by those who benefit from their labor. Formal recycling businesses heavily rely on them as upstream providers of raw material, yet offer no contracts, protections, or recognition.

A scrap metal picker in Barcelona’s Poblenou district takes a break with a coffee beside his shopping cart.

The Circle Closes

The chatarreros’ world differs vastly from Barcelona’s postcard image of Mediterranean lifestyle and Gaudí architecture. Many of them are migrants whose high hopes for a better future in Europe were disappointed. Leaving their homelands due to economic hardship and lack of opportunities, their journeys often span years, cost thousands in smuggler fees, leading through deserts, detention camps, and rough sea passages. Once at their destination, they remain locked out of formal jobs and residency, systemically driven into unofficial branches of work. Very little of what is earned makes it back home. Despite their efforts, most waste pickers earn too little to send regular remittances — the city’s discarded microwaves rarely translate into school fees or hospital bills thousands of kilometers away.

Europe’s demand for raw metal is met to a significant extent by innumerable mines in the Global South. Once the metal has been transformed, the resulting goods, abandoned after having rendered their service, must be recovered. In this case it is once again Southerners who shoulder the labor of cleanup. Western overconsumption fuels a devious circuit. Informal recyclers embody all sorts of weak links in globalization: precarious migration routes, unregulated labor markets, and rich nations’ refusal to bear the full ecological cost of their lifestyles. Chatarra, the “sustainable” yet socially unjust practice is a compelling case study in how environmental and social issues cannot be separated.

Sharing his experience, a scrap metal picker describes his daily walks through the streets collecting and selling materials.

Informality Around the Globe

The informal waste pickers business model is not confined to Barcelona’s streets. Similar street-level systems operate in many cities around the world, with a wide presence in the global south. This demonstrates that the so-called 'circular economy' still operates through a one-way flow of risk and reward, where informal workers bear the burdens, while more powerful actors reap the benefits. In Seoul, senior citizens lacking pension funds trundle handcarts piled high with cardboard. In Bogotá, entire families fan out at dawn to harvest PET bottles. In Delhi and Jakarta, low-caste or migrant pickers, sometimes children, comb through smoldering dumps in search of anything saleable. On New York’s sidewalks, “canners”, many of them recent arrivals, earn cents one crumpled can at a time. From Lisbon to Lagos, cities rely on these invisible workforces while withholding contracts, benefits, and basic recognition. Their labor sustains aspirations of sustainability. Their precarity exposes moral shortcomings spread globally.

A gathering spot for several scrap metal pickers in Barcelona, where collected materials are sorted for resale, upcycled into artworks, or repurposed into musical instruments—all within a reused garage space.

A close look reveals: Chatarra is not solely about waste or recycling. It is about power, migration, urban inequality, and the global flows of value and labor. These are people pushed to the margins by colonial legacies, racist immigration laws, and a capitalist system that exploits their labor while criminalizing their presence.

Meeting Christian Brosa

Most chatarreros are reluctant to speak out publicly. The associated stigma is too fierce. In fear of legal repercussions and loss of social standing at home, their voices remain silent. Overcoming the constraints of secrecy where testimony otherwise fails, it is art that can shed light on the situation. This is precisely the task Argentinian-born artist Christian Brosa has dedicated himself to. Once a scrap collector himself, he now transforms discarded materials into sculptural works that critique overconsumption and environmental decay. In his 200-square-meter Badalona studio, striking sculptures await. Be it masks, animal figures, or more abstract motifs, it is all crafted out of salvaged metal.

Christian Brosa in his Badalona studio, standing beside a selection of his scrap-based artworks.

Christian, how would you describe your work in a few sentences?

I’m a sculptor, painter, and a bit of a musician. Quite a while ago, I stumbled across the idea of creating sculptures out of scrap iron and other discarded material. Ever since, I’ve tried to discover the hidden potential within the remains of society’s consumerist attitude, potential that goes way beyond plain recycling value.

What attracts you to scrap metal as a medium?

Scrap metal allows creativity without any cost to it. You can find pieces, reuse them, rearrange them, and thereby create something unique. I still work that way, but nowadays I also use iron sheets and rods, which allow me to express things differently. Scrap can sometimes feel rigid, you must work with whatever shape it’s already in. I’ve been doing this for about 30 years. Scrap is a constant for me. I got the furniture in this workshop from the street. I like that, it’s a way of withdrawing from overconsumption. It’s all there, lying in the streets. Scrap is not waste; it is memory and possibility. Every piece has a story, a past. When I work with it, I don’t just transform it physically. I give it a new narrative.

What got you started? What was your career like?

Originally, I worked in photojournalism black-and-white lab work with images. But photography always felt like it was about the past. You’re capturing something that already happened. Sculpture and painting, on the other hand, are about creating something that didn’t exist before—you’re bringing something into being. I also used to collect and sell scrap metal at various points, both in Argentina and Barcelona. I learned welding from a scrap worker in Argentina named Tito Ingenieri. That was the starting point of my sculpturing career.

What themes does your art revolve around?

I work along several thematic lines. One is animals. I’m really interested in endangered species as a way of raising awareness. I once made a white rhino sculpture—there are only a few rhinos left in the world. That’s terrifying. It’s a beautiful, powerful animal. Just seeing one is incredible. We humans are responsible for what’s happening to them.

A scrap-metal bull sculpture created by Christian Brosa

How did your time scrap-picking affect your outlook on society?

When people, mostly migrants, collect scrap off the street, they’re literally picking up money. All you need to do is grab it and sell it. Just last week, I found a brand-new bicycle. I fixed it up and sold it the next day. That bike was just money lying on the street. Some of my friends still work in scrap, and sometimes they go overboard with their collecting. 

William, a scrap metal picker and friend of Christian, creates music using instruments he discovers on the streets.

I’ve been there myself. After a while, you can’t wrap your head around how much value is being dumped on the streets every day. You just can’t walk past it anymore. That’s when the absurdity of the system in place shows its true colors. I come from a place where things are repaired. Europe though, has become a place of pure overconsumption. Here’s an example: there’s a certain secluded scrapyard, hidden from public view. It’s full of car tires—a small island of them. No one’s allowed to see it. It keeps polluting the environment because no one knows what to do with it. Sure enough, some tires in Barcelona are recycled into asphalt, but that’s a drop in the ocean compared to the city’s overall waste. In the so-called Third World, these things still have value. And they could have value to us too.

How did your upbringing shape your passion for scrap?

I’m from Quilmes, a city near Buenos Aires. Around here, people throw out perfectly usable stuff—couches, ovens, toolboxes. A TV gets old? You toss it away. A bike breaks? You leave it where it is. We live in a hyper-consumerist world, which is necessarily reflected in sheer quantities of waste. Yes, there certainly are people in Spain who can’t afford to buy new stuff all the time. Recycling does exist. But still, not too many people are really interested in picking up an old couch and repairing it. Where I come from, that’s often the only option.

Who buys your work?

Usually wealthy people. The ones with money.

Does that bother you?

There’s a saying: “The rich are the spouses of art; the poor are its lovers.” Yes, I sell to rich people and I’m generally okay with it, even though I feel a bit of inner conflict. Sometimes it feels like I’ve become an interior decorator for the people my work technically critiques. But I need to sell some pieces to survive and keep creating. Only about 5% of my work is actually sold. Many pieces are not for sale. They’re deeply personal and part of a longer journey leading to something bigger.

With your art, what impact do you hope for?

There’s an Argentinian writer I admire, Sábato, who said the artist has a duty to portray their time. To reflect what’s happening. That’s what I aim for. I also want to make art accessible, less elitist. Right now, this change is actually taking place. Even in Badalona, a city characterized by industry, more and more people are engaging themselves in art. Also those, who had otherwise never really been in contact with it before. To me, art is a form of recycling. Recovery. Transformation.