Trash or treasure: Argentines strike out on their own with new technology, from the stinky to the delicious.

A noisy garbage truck reminds you to take out the trash. A foul smell is all the truck leaves behind. It's pretty much the same worldwide, although in Quilmes, Argentina, things do smell a little nicer.

Transportes Unidos de Quilmes, the waste-collection company in the city located on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, has equipped its fleet with technology from Argentina's Ecologic Motor, a producer of environmental-friendly motors and buses, for decontaminating and deodorizing rubbish as collectors toss it in. It does so by treating the waste with ozone, a gaseous form of oxygen that kills bacteria and odors 3,000 times faster than chlorine, leaving behind the smell of a fresh spring rain.

Nice-smelling trash? That's the Argentine way. Argentine inventions range from the ballpoint pen to the disposable syringe, urban bus service and the first system for making animated movies.

In terms of the number of inventors-to-population, Argentina ranks 14th in the world--the highest in Latin America--with 3,000, according to the Argentine Association of Inventors (AAI), an industry group. Despite a drop in patents, the economic crisis of the past few years has spurred invention to meet demand for lower-priced technology. In the 1990s, a strong domestic currency--it was pegged one-for-one with the U.S. dollar--made it cheaper to import than produce locally.

Now with the peso 70% weaker, foreign technology is out of reach. Hence, there is a market for homegrown products, sold cheaper in dollar terms than imports because of low labor costs. Take Matriceria Estmar, a 33-year-old company that manufactures molds for car-body and engine components. This year, it began selling a machine that semi-automates the production of empanadas, a meat pie made by hand since colonial times.

The Empamec M2000, its top machine, uses a conveyor-belt system. As it rotates, one worker lays dough on a mold, and another adds a savory filling. The mold clamps shut, sealing the meat pie. A third operator takes it off. The machine cranks out 2,000 beef, chicken and other varieties of empanada an hour, nearly seven times more than the three people could do manually.

The machine sells for US$12,500, a sixth of the cost of an imported machine, says Esteban Porco, a partner in the company.

What's more, foreign machines don't work well for empanadas, he says. They are designed for jelly and other fillings, not chunks of beef and chicken, hard-boiled eggs and olives. Estmar's machine, too, can brand and code empanadas, doing away with a system of shapes and notches in the crust to identify fillings.

Estmar is supplying a growing industry. Over the past five years, empanada chains have sprung up around the country and now are venturing abroad. A main reason is a low-budget eating habit, a result of the economic crisis. Three of them, a filling lunch, cost $1.

In its first months, Estmar sold nine machines, including one to also El Gaucho Food in Miami. Inquiries have also come from Colombia. The invention now generates half its revenue. At the same time, diversification helps. "The volatility of the automobile industry makes it hard to plan business. The food industry is more stable," says Porco.

Despite good ideas, patent requests are down 31% to 4,886 in 2003 from 7,033 in 2000, according to the national patent office. Part of the problem is the process of getting a patent. It involves reams of paperwork, it's expensive and takes up to 10 years for the government to make a decision, compared with eight months in the United States.

"Most inventors can't find the risk capital to get their product to market," says Eduardo Fernandez, creator of the world's first sparkling-wine cork remover. It costs $50,000 to $200,000 for even a low-tech invention to reach the point of sale, Fernandez says.

It is harder still to find a company to license a prototype and develop the invention. Only 2% of Argentine creations reach the domestic marketplace, compared with 15% in Japan, 8% in the United States and 4% in Europe, according to the AAI.

But there's no stopping cleaner garbage. Ecologic Motor's CEO Stephen Wheeler is already looking over the Andes at Chile, then it's on to Brazil, China and India, he says. "This will become a very big industry for Argentina," says Wheeler. "It has come too far to keep quiet."

Ecologic's trucks, too, run on cleaner-burning natural gas and make a quarter of the noise produced by a diesel engine. They get better mileage and need less maintenance, too, Wheeler claims. As a bonus, the garbage--stripped of bacteria and odor--is manually removed to be recycled or turned into fertilizer.

Cow parts. Most transport companies can't afford to buy new buses. By converting vehicles--the majority of the nation's 42,300 buses are more than a decade old--they can hold the line on fare increases yet still make money by reducing fuel and maintenance costs. Natural gas costs half the price of diesel. A bus traveling 100,000 kilometers a year can pay back the $70,000 conversion cost in a year just through fuel savings, Wheeler estimates.

Ecologic Motor, however, isn't worried about sales. Instead, it approaches government officials and bus companies to offer solutions to garbage, pollution and public transport problems.

In San Juan, a western Argentine city, the company equipped a slaughterhouse with its technology. For years, residents have clamored for its closure, complaining of the foul stench and swarms of flies. The government could not close the only slaughterhouse in the city and an employer of 2,000.

Ecologic devised a plan to keep it open and get rid of the stench by using an enzyme and ozone treatment. A "digester" machine processes stinky blood, feeding the resulting methane into a generator to power the slaughterhouse. Unused cow parts are turned into liquid compost for sale to farms.