Rubbish, rivers and contamination: making a living from pollution
By Naomi Conrad
An evening stroll through one of the leafy upper-class neighbourhoods of Buenos Aires reveals the grim reality coexisting with the displayed wealth of the luxurious apartment buildings, chic boutiques and antiques shops: slum-dwellers, often whole families, from the surrounding villas pick through ripped-open bin bags in search for recyclable materials, which are then transported back to the processing plants in the slums to be sorted and sold on: Horse, sometimes man-drawn carts, overflowing with precariously stacked piles of paper and stacks of plastic, slowly meander their way round the streets. The city’s grim commuter trains, stripped bare of seats and tables and windowsills, rumble out of town weighed down by human bodies and piles of scavenged rubbish.
To many these cartoneros are a potent symbol of the growing inequalities in Argentina. While the upper deciles in the country have benefited from the liberalization and privatization programmes of recent years, many Argentines experienced rising poverty and unemployment. The polarization of society worsened with the Argentine financial crash of 2001: as the economic and financial system melted down, poverty rates spiralled, forcing many people to become creative in order to survive. Shifting through rubbish bags provided a meagre living to many, an estimated 8.000 cartoneros collect and sort rubbish and many processing plants are run as cooperatives.
However, inequalities aside, the cartoneros are also an obvious symbol of the city’s disastrous and rudimentary waste disposal system. In a sprawling metropolis of some estimated 3 million inhabitants that, according to Juan Carlos Villalonga from Greenpeace in Buenos Aires, produces some 5,000 tones of rubbish every day, rubbish and recycling containers are almost completely lacking. Every night, Buenos Aires’ inhabitants dump their household rubbish in black plastic bags onto the pavement outside of their houses. The rubbish bags are then ripped open by the cartoneros. Whatever they discard collects on the pavements and gutters to fester and mould, blows down the streets and falls into rivers.
What rubbish is finally collected, is dumped in landfills. The rubbish dumps, in their majority located in the slum belt surrounding Buenos Aires, are rapidly overflowing. The construction of new ones is politically difficult, as the slum dwellers have learnt to organize themselves. Faced with an ever-growing and increasingly acute rubbish problem, the previous administration passed the Cero Basura (zero rubbish) law in 2005. An ambitious, some say over-ambitious and impossible, law, which prescribes an end to the burying of recyclable waste in the city by 2020. The law also includes the minimization of solid waste and generally the creation a clean and environmentally sustainable city. The law establishes several mid-term targets: by the end of this year a third less waste should be buried, compared to 2004. However, so far, the authorities are far from fulfilling this objective. While some containers for recycling are now dotted around the city, hardly anyone uses them, let alone correctly, and many are vandalised.
A recent United Nations report stressed that Latin American countries have made progress in terms of access to clean water and sanitation, while failing to curb greenhouse gas emission and deforestation. In Buenos Aires this progress has yet to make itself felt, according to Jorge Carpio, director of FOCO, an NGO in Buenos Aires which has taken Shell to court for contaminating the slums surrounding one of its factories. “Shell contaminated the slums”, he stresses, “and its children now have lead in their blood because they drank the contaminated water”. Contaminated water, Villalonga concurs, remains a major problem is Buenos Aires.
The pungent smell of Riachuelo, a brownish-grey river, debris and dead fish floating on its grimy surface, coated with a slimy, silvery film of oil, floats across the river’s poor neighbourhood. The Riachuelo is the country’s, and one of the world’s, most polluted waterways. What is more, Buenos Aires’ sewage flows unprocessed directly into the Rio de la Plata, which divides Argentina and Uruguay, and on to the ocean. Sewage processing plants simply do not exist in Argentina. According to Graciela Gerola, who is the director of a newly created governmental federal environment agency, the river’s pollution and with it the possible construction of sewage plants is a national competency: So while the river flows through and pollutes Buenos Aires’ backyards, the national government is left to deal with it. So far, little has been done. Time maybe for some enterprising minds to turn pollution into a living.