Reuse > Recycle and other misc recycling.

Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca

The reuse economy still holds strong in many parts of Mexico, like any other country with developing economies and income disparities. Reuse and repair trump recycling any day. Many folks make a living repairing things from washing machines to shoes to cars in Mexico.

Not necessarily a repair situation here but I thought this backyard or in-house mini anaerobic digestor was interesting. The store owner said you could use the fuel to cook. I would love to see more innovation in this space, especially in rural areas were you have to truck out tank after tank of cooking fuel. 

You think that stroller is creepy, you should have seen the junk yard dog behind the computer towers. Some sketchy e-waste recycling going on at this warehouse.  

Collected and bagged idling PET. A common sight at places along the coast where organization will collect the thousands of littered water and soda bottles. This all looks good to the tourist but these bottles will idle for a very long time and eventually be landfilled or worse, re-littered and end up in the ocean. As no one can economically get this material to market, it will not happen. 

Some Mexican Landfills

Outside of Oaxaca City. You pass dozens of recycling buyers on the route to this landfill. 

If you look closely, you can see workers with super sacks sorting out PET, Metal, HDPE and OCC. This is a common sight all over Latin America and the world. People working in horrible conditions and living on or near the landfill. I would assume this landfill is emitting a horrendous amount of methane. It is clearly not capturing any of it for energy use or flaring. 

Just a little lechate leak.  

This landfill is one of 5 huge landfills outside of Mexico City. Really hard to tell how big this is, but if you look closely you can see tiny long haul transfer trucks dumping waste. This landfill was just dug right into the side of a mountain. 

A lot more to cover on Mexico City's new transfer station system. I was unable to get a picture of one of the reload trucks so I'll have to make a trip back to cover that. Long story short, collection trucks gather and dump waste at the transfer stations on the outskirts of town where material is loaded onto long haul tractor trailers and taken to landfill. A relatively new development in Mexico City from my understanding. 

Metals yard outside Oaxaca

Metals comes in from metal scrappers and from the garbage trucks who have separated it out and are selling it on the way to the landfill. 

In the bigger cities like Mexico City and Puebla there are of course very large scrap yards. Here in the outskirts of Oaxaca City, folks make do with mini-balers and manual labor to run the yard.

When you don't have a shredder, you have to play Tetris with you long hauling to maximize the weight and space of your load. 

Collecting garbage, separating recycling and selling it on the way to the Transfer Station or Landfill

Roma Norte, Mexico City

Municipal garbage collectors sort recycling behind their truck. They attach the bags and super sacks of aluminum, PET, HDPE, mixed rigids, and paper to anywhere they can on the truck. No separate recycling trucks in Mexico. "Run what you brung" (using the resources you have) 

Oaxaca City, Oaxaca Mexico

The industrious gentlemen who owned this PET and OCC recycling facility on the outskirts of Oaxaca would not let me take photos but he had quite and impressive operation. Horizontal baler with a conveyor and a Plastics sort line with a conveyor. He had about 10 people working for him. The most technology I've yet to see in a my travels.

 A scrap metals yard. Also on the outskirts of Oaxaca, on the route to the landfill. 

Farther down the road on the way to the landfill. Dozens of garbage trucks are parked by the dozens of recycling buyers. The trucks sell their material to the highest bidder, or family members who own the buying facilities. These facilities range in size and infrastructure. The one pictured here was small and had no technology. Buyers would combine like materials and sell them to the bigger buyers with balers who would then ship and market materials. 

Centro Ecologico, Mexico CIty

Centro Ecologico

The Roma Norte Barrio in Mexico City. In my opinion, what a fantastic model. I wish every city in the world had a place like this. Everyone from the recycling collector who lives on the street to apartment dwelling middle class citizens were selling their magazines, newspapers and assorted metals. This model gives the customer the incentive to recycle clean, source separated materials. Even if you are not making much money out of this, who wouldn't sell the magazines they've accumulated at the Centro Ecologico if you lived in the neighborhood? Do it on the way to the store, etc.... Fantastic model here. 

 Papel.........Paper

Metal....Metal

Why don't we just recycle AT the landfill?

 Still at the Bariloche Recycling Association. This facility had so much going for it, it needed two posts.
I had yet to see something that quite like what was going on here in Bariloche. Notice that The Bariloche Recycling Association's building is across the street from the landfill. How convenient.

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 Here in Barlioche, the recyclers source directly from landfill. Some of the workers are in the building baling the bags of sorted material, but the majority of the workers are here in the open landfill waiting for the next truck to arrive with the City's garbage. They pull out plastic, metal, and fibers form the waste stream as soon as it hits the ground. And yes, they also have the landfill with the best view in South America, something they were proud to point out.

When I first arrived in Bariloche I took note that the City had no recycling effort. It was only after I found this gem that I realized that not only was the City recycling, but they were recycling quite well actually. The municipality pays the workers some money and helps with upkeep with the building, but the majority of their income comes from the sale of their baled commodities. This gives them a very strong incentive to pull all they can out of the landfill.

At the time of my visit they were building a 2nd, larger building to relocate the recycling balers. Also, a plot of land was being prepared to start composting. I've yet to see composting on a municipal level in South America and I can't wait to return in a couple years to see how it turns out.

The cleanest market-ready bales I've ever seen

So not the most interesting pictures here at the Asociación de Reciclaje de Bariloche (Bariloche Recycling Association) but if you look closely with a recycling geek's eye... you'll notice that these bales are incredibly clean. By clean I mean free of contaminates. Only materials that are suppose to be in those bales are in those bales.

 Only green and blue PET are suppose to be in the front bales and only clear PET is suppose to be in the back bales. If you look closely (which I did) that is all you will see.

 I have never seen such clean bales before in the United States. Sure our tonnages may be much higher, but the quality of US bales ready for market are not this clean. Why? The folks here at The Bariloche Recycling Association sort everything by hand (much like Bogota). There is no conveyor belt moving items past them at high speed, there is no machine blowing air at different colored plastic launching them into the correct bin, there is no magnet pulling up steal, there is no electric charge flinging away the aluminium, and there are no gears or wheels carrying away cardboard.

Tonnages here may be incomparable to a MRF (Materials Recovery Facility) in the states, but I'd bet the buyers of these commodities are pretty pleased with the material they are receiving. Part of the reason more and more paper mills are going out of business on the west coast is that bales of fiber they buy from the recycler carry too many contaminates. Those contaminates damage their equipment and make using a recycling feed stock unprofitable. The less buyers of recycled material in the US means a heavier reliance on markets overseas.
Remember, recycling won't happen if no one will buy what you are trying to recycle.

Landfills. Sort of....

Tupiza, Bolivia Landfill

Here in Tupiza, like many other Municipalities, refuse is taken to the local dump where it is....well, dumped. Just dumped. In the States, the EPA and other environmental governing agencies require landfills to apply a cover after each day of adding garbage. It is called Alternative Daily Cover (ADC) and it usually comprises of dirt, wood chips, industrial plastic scrap, even organics sometimes. The cover is meant to stop the escape of methane, and of course rouge flying plastics among other things.

In South America, I have yet to see a covered landfill. In this example, trash blows off the landfill every time the wind blows and debris can be found miles away form the landfill.
It makes one wonder why bother to collect garbage and bring it to a central location if it is bound to blow back into the surrounding landscape anyway? I often times find myself disgusted by the amount of litter in South America, but seeing such landfills makes me realize that sometimes throwing the item in the trash bin isn´t much better.

These folks are picking out the PET and stuffing it in SuperSaks. They were also picking out some clothing items. Unfortunately they declined to speak with me so I am not sure where they sell the PET and for what price. It was incredibly difficult to walk anywhere near this landfill as the flies and smells were overpowering. I have been around a lot of garbage and have certainly sorted through my fare share of trash and compost but I have a powerful respect for the people pictured above.

Tilcara, Argentina Landfill

No litter pickers at this landfill in Argentina. I have yet to see any plastics recycling efforts in the Northern part of the country. I assume it is the lack of any nearby market/buyer.
This landfill is in a river basin. When the water rises, it also picks up the plastics and other debris that has blow off this uncovered landfill. Again, it makes one wonder...what is the point of collection here? I saw a lot of glass here as it is one of the items that won´t blow or float away.

Bogota central recycling facility

Here is the Materials Recovery Facility (where they sort and bale incoming co-mingled recycling for market) I mentioned in the last post. 

"What an odd scale" I thought to myself before I realized that it was for the tow wheeled donkey carts, not the large trucks like we have in the US. Most scales I have seen in the states are all large enough to fit an 18 wheeler. 

 Every commodity category is sorted here; by hand. Green PET from clear , Tetra pak, paper, shredded paper, rigid plastic, film clear, film mixed, aluminum, steal, etc…

 In many cities in the states there is no market for Tetra Paks, by no means do they fetch a good price here in Bogota, but at least they are recycling them.

  They even separate  out the clear PET that contained cooking oil. I believe it has a lower value than the normal PET (or at least keeps the normal PET price higher with it out of the mix), and there is so much food that is fried in cooking oil here, it may warrant its own stream.

 I loved this! I have never seen a bale bound together with twine in the States. All balers I have seen before use a metal cable. The baler in this facility puts this operations miles ahead of the rest of the recycling centers in Bogota, but it has its differences than the States.

Bales of Tetra Paks and more ready for market. 

Bogota recycling depot, the power of hand sorting.

This is Margdaula (or at least that is how I wrote her name down). She runs a recycling center in Bogota. This center happens to be right next to the largest and maybe only MRF (Materials Recovery Facility) in Bogota. The MRF next door is run by contractors under the Mayor’s office. Margdaula can pay a higher price for a lot of items than other recycling centers I visited as she is so close to one of the big buyer/sellers (the MRF next door).

She does some clever things here to maximize her profits. The most interesting being stripping all the PET she buys of caps and wraps. She tells me that this almost DOUBLES the price she can get for selling PET clear and Green.
How amazing is that? In the states we would never think to have a person physically do that task.
In Portland for example, the bottle bill collected PET is stripped of its caps and wraps at OR-PET in St. Helens and the non-PET is turned into its own mix of flake. I believe it is then sent to Denton Plastics in Gresham for the final stages of recycling and sold to buyers from there. In Portland we have somewhat of a solution for the caps and wraps, but in many cities around the world the caps and wraps devalue the PET stream.
I would say that is another great example of the power of the human hand in recycling.
In the west coast we believe we have a lot to show the world about recycling, but sometimes I´d argue the opposite. 

Bogota depot

Here is a Mom and Pop recycling transfer station. As in this location buys materials by the Kilo from street recyclers and the the materials in larger amounts to the next buyer on the food chain, or directly to end market. 

Cardboard, PET, Film Plastic, Newspaper, Office Paper, Mixed Rigid Plastics. All these items have a price: meaning all these items are picked up off the street or out of garbage bags left for the garbage truck.

Bogota, Colombia. After hearing a lot about the industry in Bogota, I  had to make a detour there. 

 This was probably my favorite sight of the day; a bike picking up recycling. Garbage/Recycling trucks are incredibly fuel innefficent, averaging around 3-5 miles per desiel gallon. They create smog pollution and noise pollution, and they are horrible for the steets costing municipalites more money then they probably realize.

 Here is one of the hundreds of donkey carts used to collect recycling by independent street workers all over the city. They collect, sort, and bring their recycling to mom and pop buyers all over the city. People are hauling these carts around because last year the Mayor banned horses. I heard he gave some trucks to the bigger companies, but I see many people lugging these around, not so many trucks....at least there is less smog?

 Here is a street recycler I kept in touch with while in Bogota. His turf was the neighborhood where I was staying. He said he was making $0.036 a pound off of PET, still not a lot, but much better than any price I found in Peru. There must be healthier recycling markets here in Bogota. He collects glass, aluminim, plastic and cardboard.

 And again, the best of the best....REUSE.- Here my hostel collects empty glass soda and beer bottles and the items are picked up by a guy on a motor bike and taken back to the bottler. BETTER THAN RECYCLING

 Basura CERO, a Program launched by the Mayor last year. By no means is Bogota Zero Waste. A qualification meaning you achive a 90% waste diversion rate in the US. I believe Bogota is around 20%. You have to start somewhere.

Here, a recycler with a Basura Cero loggo on his cart (maybe he is somehow associated with the City´s program?) follows the garbage truck on its route collecting recycling before it goes into the trash truck and is lost forever. I saw many folks following the truck routes collecting recycling.

Plastic ball bit

Here in Ollantaytambo, a stop along Peru Rail before Machu Pichu, the municipal street workers collect and store the PET bottles here while cleaning the streets.

 I asked some locals where this ball pit of plastic ends up and was told Cusco or Lima. There are many recycling transferstations around Cusco, but I believe the final market (where the plastics bottle manufature is) is in Lima.

 Below is a recycling transfer station in a town called Puycara. From what I understood with my rough spanish is that they buy PET at $0.006 a lb. Not much but, and this is a huge but, they are buying it. There is no way I could walk into a Far West Recycling depot in Portland with PET slung over my back and actually get money for it. I am sure many other cities in the US also do not have recyclers buying PET off scrappers.
So the price is low, but they are buying it from individuals (most have a truck or motor bike to haul bottles in). The fact that there is value to the PET gives folks the insentive to collect it and bring it here. It has nothing to do with the environment, it is purly an economical force driving recycling in the Sacred Valley.

 A giant mountain of PET. The lady under the yellow tarp is sorting the green from the clear.

Beware of gaurd dogs. This was the first time I regretted not getting a rabies shot before my trip.