By BRONSON PETTITT
Mexico Weekly / March 16, 2011
Trash pickers on Tuesday temporarily closed Mexico City's largest waste facility after operations at a sorting and separation plant were suspended.
“Pepenadores” – as the trash pickers are called in Spanish – closed the Bordo Poniente waste facility for most of Tuesday morning and afternoon, after the plant became saturated with trash on Monday night and was unable to process it, said Isaías Villa González, general coordinator of the city's Public Projects Program.
Dozens of semis and trucks loaded with garbage waited on Periférico Oriente – a major highway in the city – for as long as nine hours outside Bordo Poniente, one of the largest dumps in Latin America.
The landfill re-opened by late Tuesday and trucks were allowed to unload trash, said Villa, who went to the site to negotiate with the pepenadores and other employees.
“According to [pepenadores], there was too much trash accumulated and they couldn't work,” Villa said.
In some landfills in Mexico, pepenadores still sort through trash by hand. Such was the case at the Bordo Poniente until a separation facility was installed several years ago.
Villa told Mexico Weekly that corruption is one of the main reasons why the processing plant becomes saturated. Bordo Poniente, which now receives about 8,500 tons of trash per day, is meant to receive trash produced exclusively in Mexico City. However, corrupt Bordo Poniente employees sometimes allow trucks from unauthorized companies or from other states to throw their trash inside the landfill, including trucks from the State of Mexico and Puebla, Villa said.
“The problem with the leaders of the pepenadores is that they have made a way of life off [valuable trash] the trash pickers find,” Villa said.
Not all of these workers are corrupt, says Héctor Castillo Berthier, a sociologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) who has spent more than 30 years studying pepenadores and waste disposal in Mexico.
Job Security
Trash pickers are also worried about the future of their jobs.
The city has less than nine months to find another site to dump its trash before the Bordo Poniente closes permanently. The Mexico City government and federal government signed an agreement last year to end operations on Jan. 1, 2012.
Villa says trash pickers will have jobs even after the Bordo Poniente closes.
“We're preparing a proposal so they can have alternatives. We're not going to leave them up in the air,” he said.
Villa estimates there are 500 pepenadores at Bordo Poniente based on lists provided by leaders of trash pickers who work at the site, but Castillo estimates there are as many as 2,000.
As for trash, its future is less certain. The city produces 14,000 tons of garbage per day, but 6,500 tons are recycled, used for biogas or sent to sites other than Bordo Poniente.
The capital government (GDF) has already taken measures to reduce the production of trash. In recent weeks, the GDF announced stricter measures requiring residents and businesses to separate inorganic and organic trash. Last year, businesses were banned from giving away plastic bags, and were ordered to charge a small fee for them.
But these measures are not enough, Castillo says.
“One of the most common complaints of stay-at-home moms is, 'I separate my trash, I take it to the trash truck and they mix it all together again',” he said.
“We have to see [a reduction in trash production] as a medium- and long-term process. Laws don't bring about change, habits do.”
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