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Dumps, borders and beaches: Mexico’s garbage crisis
photo by Noticias de tu Ciudad (Flickr CC)
Rubbish is piling up in Mexico’s capital after the city’s largest waste dump, Bordo Poniente, was closed after the landfill was, for lack of a better word, filled.
The landfill, in fact, was meant to close back in 2005, but the city managed to delay closure by 6 years. Now garbage is accumulating in illegal dumps in Mexico City, on street corners and even in front of monuments.
The fact that Mexico lags behind in waste reducing measures, such as recycling programs, compounds the problem in the DF.
From the Guardian:
The demise of the Bordo Poniente exposed how acutely the Mexican capital is struggling with the challenge of moving from a chaotic refuse collection system to more modern waste management. While Buenos Aires and Bogotá receive regular praise for their efforts to generate less rubbish and recycle more, Mexico City is held up as an example of what not to do.
And it’s not just Mexico City that is suffering from excess trash. Remote deserts on the Mexican-US border are strewn with waste left behind by illegal immigrants crossing into the US in search of a better life.
From the Daily Mail:
The problem was compounded as immigrants and drug traffickers responded to ramped up vigilance on the U.S.-Mexico border by taking increasingly remote routes, leaving more waste behind in out-of-the way and hard-to-clean areas, authorities say.
Clean-up efforts are largely dependent on volunteers from the US state of Arizona.
Then there are the plastic and garbage covered beaches on Mexico’s Caribbean coastline, in an area called Mahahual. This has nothing to do with the habits of locals or tourists, but simply the misfortune of the beaches being located along the path of a regional ocean current which channels the rubbish into the area and washes it up on shore.
The area is home to the Banco Chinchorro, a large coral reef that is a diver’s paradise, and the Sian Ka’an Biosphere Reserve, a sprawling, government-protected zone populated by egrets, cormorants and other waterfowl. Tourism tends to be on a small scale, with the exception of cruise ships that pull up to a pier in Mahahual that was rebuilt in 2008, after Hurricane Dean
–Los Angeles Times
According to some estimates 46,000 pieces of plastic waste are in every square mile of the Earth’s oceans. I’m assuming this is an estimated average, but it’s shocking however you interpret it.
Read more on that story in the Los Angeles Times.
Tags: border, Bordo Poniente, garbage, Mexico City, US, waste
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Good points, Murielle. It may sound extreme to some, but a lot, if not all, disposable packaging should be banned if it isn’t easily recyclable, truly biodegradable, etc. I remember visiting Europe in the 80s and you were simply not given shopping bags. Everyone knew it and so they brought their own reusable. It’s nothing new. But then, since it was legal, all the shops gave plastic bags and people got used to the convenience. Now the world is choking on them. Whose fault is it? Business…
The garbage problem is a problem we are all facing. Do you remember what age you where when you realized that something you trow in the dustbin doesn’t disappear forever, but just get’s moved to some other place where you don’t see or smell it anymore? I know I was quiet old when I figured that out! It takes all of us to help fix this problem, finding new dump sites is not the answer. Its consumption and our economies that are at the basis of this problem… Over the past year my family has worked hard to reduce our house hold waste. We are not at 1/4 of the waste we produced last year. Buying less stuff and being careful when we buy as to what the packaging will mean in terms of waste. We also try to avoid plastic as much as we can. For groceries that means going to the local stores where we get paper packaging instead of the mass-produced packages of bigger stores… We also have chickens now (4 of them), they take care of almost all our kitchen waste in give us super darn good eggs in return!
yeah absolutely.
I’ve seen documentaries on Patayas, Rachel, with all those people literally living in the dump. I don’t think thinks are nearly that bad in Mexico…
Every country has rubbish, trash, garbage crisis…We have landfills like Payatas , We are having a hard time sorting and dealing with our own trash and yet there’s some stupid treaty which allows the dumping of other country’s wastes like Japan…woe unto us!!!!!!!!!!!
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