In Salt Lake
At home in Salt Lake, we sort our trash. Recyclables go into the blue bin. Yard waste goes into the brown bin. We put glass into a separate box and drop it off at a nearby glass recycling dumpster. Everything else goes into the green bin. We place the blue, brown and green bins on the curb in front of the house on Monday evening. Early Tuesday morning, large, automated garbage trucks pick up the bins and hoist them up and over, causing the contents to fall into the truck.
I assume the city recycles the contents of the blue bin, mulches the contents of the brown bin and takes the contents of the green bin to the landfill, although of course I have never witnessed any of this in person.
In Surco
When we moved into our small second floor apartment in the comfortably middle-class municipality of Surco in Lima, Daniel hung a plastic grocery bag from a hook in the kitchen. We placed all our trash in the bag and when it got full, we took it outside and placed it on the sidewalk.
Bags of garbage awaiting collection on the sidewalk across the street from our apartment.
What, no sorting and recycling??
But as I watched the street below from our apartment window, I noticed people riding what looked like large tricycles with a platform in front of the seat for holding bags. They rode up and down the streets stopping at each pile of trash, rummaging through the bags and extracting anything of value – plastic and glass bottles, aluminum cans (not as common in Peru as in the United States), cardboard boxes.
When the garbage truck came by later that night, the remaining piles were quite small. The crew standing on a platform on the back of the truck easily picked up the bags and tossed them into the truck.
The next morning all that was left of the pile of garbage bags were a few scraps of paper.
The next morning, a street sweeper came and swept away the remaining debris.
A street sweeper, dressed in bright orange for safety, sweeps up debris left in the street and on the sidewalks each day.
This system works quite well. Trash that can be recycled is recycled. The remaining garbage is picked up every night. The streets and sidewalks of Surco are generally quite clean.
But this system obviously depends on cheap labor. Minimum wage in Peru is 1,100 soles per month. Given 20 workdays per month and an exchange rate of 3.5 soles per dollar, this works out to approximately 16 dollars per day for the sanitation workers. Middle class Surco can afford to staff adequate garbage collection.
The people that search through the garbage to collect recyclables are probably not paid at all. They may only be receiving the money that they can get by selling the recyclables that they collect.
In addition to cheap labor, this system also depends on a well-run municipal sanitation department that can hire, manage and schedule the staff that does the work. This is the case in prosperous middle class Surco. It not the case everywhere.
On the Pan American Highway
One week we decided to visit relatives living in Chiclayo. Chiclayo is Peru’s fourth-largest city. It is located about 500 miles north of Lima. We decided to drive. Bad choice! We left our apartment about 2 in the afternoon, got lost in the northern outskirts of Lima for a couple of hours, and finally left the metropolitan area around sunset. Lima is enormous and the traffic is unimaginably awful. I slept fitfully in the back seat while Daniel drove through the night and his sister Netita navigated.
When I woke up at dawn, we were driving across the desert about halfway between Trujillo and Chiclayo. The dramatic shapes of the foothills of the Andes towered off in the distance to our right. To our left, desert stretched to the nearby Pacific Ocean. It was a wild and empty landscape, made even more desolate and eerie by all the trash covering everything from the shoulder of the highway for about 100 feet into the desert. The trash on the ground glittered in the early morning light and plastic bags caught on the occasional thorny bushes fluttered and waved in the wind. A very post-apocalyptic scene!
In Chiclayo
Trash was everywhere along the roads and highways and in the industrial areas around the city. So were signs prohibiting the trash!
A trash can in downtown Chiclayo.
The sign on the trash can proclaims “It is prohibited to leave garbage outside this garbage can. We are recording you!”
Everyone in Chiclayo admits it’s a problem and nobody likes the trash, but it is only under control in the residential and business areas of the city. Perhaps this will change as the region develops more, but perhaps not. Chiclayo seems quite prosperous, which means that it produces more trash than it used to. And the character of the trash has changed.
Just One Word – Plastic!
A hundred years ago, household trash was probably mostly food waste. If you threw it out behind your farmhouse, most of it would be eaten by stray dogs and turkey vultures and the rest would weather away or rot quickly. Not with plastic. Nothing eats the plastic wrappers, bottles and bags and it takes decades for them to disintegrate.
Salt Lake and Surco, being more affluent, undoubtedly produce more plastic trash per capita than the rural towns along the Panamericano Norte highway. But in Salt Lake and Surco the plastic trash is collected and disposed of. Out of sight and out of mind. On the Panamericano Norte highway the plastic trash is spread out for all the world to see.