Favio Chávez & The Cateura Recycled Orchestra From waste to music
The Recycled Orchestra of Cateura is a Paraguayan youth orchestra whose members play musical instruments made entirely from materials recovered from a landfill.
The place and social context
Cateura is < cite index=“30-1”>a neighborhood of Asunción, the capital of Paraguay, formed around the city’s municipal landfill, one of the largest in South America. < cite index=“32-1”>Most residents make their living selling plastic bottles or anything else they can recycle from the trash. It’s an environment marked by poverty and lack of education, where children and young people are especially vulnerable to falling into delinquency and drugs.
Origin of the project
< cite index=“33-1”>The orchestra was created in 2012 by musician and environmental technician Favio Chávez. Chávez began teaching music to children in the community but ran into an obvious obstacle: < cite index=“33-1”>a real violin costs more than a house in that context. The solution was to build the instruments themselves out of trash.
The instruments
A key collaborator was < cite index=“32-1”>Nicolás “Cola” Gómez, a trash picker turned luthier, responsible for finding materials and building the instruments alongside Chávez. Some of the most striking examples: < cite index=“28-1”>a double bass with a body made from an oil can, a saxophone made from rain gutters with bottle caps and coins, and a violin fashioned from a pizza pan, a fork, and a spoon. One of the most famous instruments is a violin nicknamed the < cite index=“30-1”>“Stradivarius of Cateura,” presented in Germany in 2012.
Repertoire and international reach
< cite index=“34-1”>The orchestra performs classical music, folk music, Latin American music, songs by the Beatles, Frank Sinatra, movie soundtracks, and even symphonic metal. They’ve < cite index=“33-1”>played in numerous countries and shared the stage with artists like Stevie Wonder, Metallica, and Megadeth.
The documentary
The story gained worldwide fame thanks to the documentary “Landfill Harmonic” (2016), which chronicles the project’s origin and development.
Social impact
Today, the music school associated with the project < cite index=“34-1”>gives free weekly classes to 300–400 students in the Cateura neighborhood, offering them a formative and creative alternative amid the vulnerable conditions in which they live.
The Recycled Orchestra of Cateura is an educational project by music teacher Favio Chávez in Cateura (Paraguay) on upcycling waste material into music instruments for poor people.
Beethoven 5th Symphony (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1KPLj6adj8)
The documentary film Landfill Harmoniv (2015), by Brad Allgood and Graham Townsley.
Sonidos de la Tierra (“World Sounds” in Spanish), to export the project in order to defend teenagers and young people from extreme poverty in Paraguay.