Trash talk…

Reprinted in the Free Republic was this story from Dudley Althaus of the Houston Chronicle:

MEXICO CITY — Mexicans have become world-class litterbugs.

Soft drink bottles, snack wrappers, used diapers and cigarette butts clog city streets, rural highways and scenic beaches. Mountains of garbage stand sentry-like in empty lots and at the edges of bucolic rural villages. Discarded plastic bags hang in trees and dangle from cactus like bitter industrial fruit.

Not every Mexican litters, of course. And perhaps no one does so all the time. But enough of them do, enough of the time, that this nation of 105 million people is choking on its refuse.

Yet, there has been no concerted long-term anti-litter campaign. Only a smattering of Mexican towns and cities have municipal garbage dumps.

For many environmentalists, litter takes a backseat to fouled water, dirty air, coastline overbuilding, widespread deforestation and severe soil erosion. To many citizens, litter is all but invisible. And in the view of some observers, there is a lack of public responsibility.

What’s interesting is that the “Freepi” use this not too remarkable story as a way of attacking Mexican immigrants (and immigrants in general) while the Houstonians wonder why the story was considered newsworthy.

Not that litter isn’t a serious problem in Mexico, but the folks who commented in Houston have traveled, and note that a lot of countries have a litter problem.  And, they’re more used to Mexican social customs.

I’m wondering if Mr. Althaus has to deal with his own trash in Mexico City, or whether he has a cha-cha to clean up after him.  Mexicans keep their homes spotless, and at least in Mexico City, the trash man comes twice a day (preceded by a guy walking down the street with an old fashioned hand-clapper bell… I always think of him yelling “bring out your dead stuff”).  And, at least in my neighborhood, the trash men also came early in the morning to clean up the stuff that piled up on the corner.

Yeah, that was messy.  People STILL pile their trash out on the street corner at night and wait for the trash men in the morning.  And it attracts rats.  I once had the bejeebus scared out of me when I peed on a trash pile late one night and — literally — had a very pissed off rat come out after me.

At least in Mexico City (which is 20% of the population, so you’re talking about a big chunk of the “real Mexico” here) trash is picked up, but there’s no where to put it.  The trashmen’s union, which was quite powerful, and popular (people used to cheer the garbage trucks at the Revolution Day parade, and boo — or moon — the police cars) was connected to the PRI, so when the PRD took over the socialists surprisingly semi-privatized trash collection, opening up the field to more haulers… which meant those two daily collections.

Between tips, a good union and the rights to salvage, the garbage men might have lived AT the dump, but they didn’t live in a dump, nor were they down in the dumps.  They had decent homes, soccer fields, good schools… and high rates of environmentally-caused diseases.

For a time, Mexico City was trying to get people to sort organic and inorganic trash, but the campaign wasn’t going well… just for the simple reason that the trucks had no way to separate the trash, and the landfills weren’t set up for it.  On the other hand, plastics were starting to be recycled, and the more entrepreneural trash collectors were sorting the salable from unsalable trash.
I’ve seen a few positives.  Where plastic recycling is available, entrepreneurs spring up to take advantage of it.  In Mexico City, the dog poop problem isn’t nearly as bad as it used to be, both through stricter enforcement of “scoop the poop” laws and old fashioned community propaganda (I was amused that my socialist neighborhood had signs reading “For the good of the people, and the health of all, please clean up your animal’s defecations” while those in conservative Polanco said “If your dog shits here, we’ll call the cops”… whatever fits the local style, I guess).

And relative scarcity has meant people save, or reuse, what they have… or find adaptive reuses for things.  You can’t go dumpster-diving for good stuff in Mexico City, just because somebody will snag up the good stuff before you get there.  If you put a broken sofa on the street, somebody will take it to a reupolstery shop.  Old refrigerators are gonna mysteriously make their way into … well… almost anything.  The refrigerator repair guys are gonna gut the thing for every usable part, and the miscellaneous scrap is gonna end up somewhere.

It’s out of the cities that your see the trash… uncovered landfills and no one to pick up the stuff.

What’s the problem?

It’s not that people won’t clean up trash, or don’t “get it,” it’s that the problem has grown faster than the solution.   Not enough landfill space, not enough money for trash collection and… the number one problem… too much stuff.  Plastic bags, plastic bottles (you still return your glass beer and soda bottles to the store), disposable diapers.  The same stuff we want, and the same problem we have.

But, we have illegal immigrants to pick it up for us.