Posted on 06/25/2007 8:27:31 AM PDT by SwinneySwitch
Activists say public isn't only culprit — leaders and companies are also culpable
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.
"People see it as a problem that doesn't affect them, but it does," said Francisco Padron, director of a Mexico City civic organization aimed at educating the public on environmental issues.
Consider just a few impacts:
• Litter contributes to severe flooding in Mexico City every rainy season, which is beginning now, when discarded bottles and other trash clog storm drains. Each year the city government makes a plea to end the littering. And each year that plea is uniformly ignored. • "Uncleanliness" — primarily litter — ranks first among the complaints of foreign tourists visiting Mexico, according to studies conducted by the Tourism Ministry. • Haphazard roadside dumps serve as breeding grounds for mosquitoes, contributing to the outbreak of dengue fever and other diseases in rural southern villages. Environmentalists blame a lack of government programs and corporate interest for much of the problem.
Fines for littering are rare and even more rarely enforced. Few cities or towns bother to put trash cans in the streets. Even where public trash cans do exist, they're seldom emptied.
Mexican environmental officials say that only several dozen of Mexico's more than 2,500 cities, towns and villages have a landfill or other kind of municipal garbage dump.
"There is a lack of political will," said Jorge Trevino, director of ECOCE (Ecología y Compromiso Empresarial), an industry-funded group that manages recycling and public awareness campaigns. "There is a lack of infrastructure. In many cities, there is a lack of planning. There is nowhere to put the trash."
But there's also a lack of public concern or responsibility, Trevino and other activists say.
People tuck pop bottles into hedges, trees and lampposts. Schoolchildren drop snack packages wherever they please. Drivers of intercity buses instruct passengers to toss refuse out the windows rather than leave it aboard.
There's also little downside, either legal or social, for the litterers.
"In the United States, you have an authority that is watching. Here in Mexico, there is nothing like that," Trevino said. "If you throw trash on the highway here in Mexico, no one says anything."
Like many of its social problems, Mexico's litter epidemic may be anchored in a deeply entrenched political system in which citizen input has been discouraged.
Not 'their' problem Trash pickup in Mexico City and other urban centers has been free and largely controlled by labor unions, said Hector Castillo, a sociologist who studies the refuse industry at Mexico's National Autonomous University. Many Mexicans consider trash, including litter, to be somebody else's problem. "They throw trash in the street because that's why they pay taxes," Castillo said. "Somebody else picks it up."
Litter has become a global problem, of course. But societies like Mexico's, whose exploding and still-poor populations crowd into cities and consume packaged food rather than what they produce themselves, suffer the most from it.
"There has been a more dramatic change in the types of waste we are producing than in the culture of disposing of that waste," said Padron, the Mexico City environmentalist. "Trash has been seen only as waste and not as valuable material that can be recycled."
Padron and other activists say corporations have an obligation to figure out how to dispose of packaging.
"In a responsible economy, they have the responsibility for what happens to their wastes," Padron said.
Mexico has yet to experience a watershed moment that brings litter to the forefront of public consciousness, environmentalists say. And anti-litter efforts must be intense, sustained and widespread to be effective. Even then, there are no guarantees.
Don't Mess With Mexico The Don't Mess With Texas campaign, run by the state's Department of Transportation, is considered one of the more successful in the United States. Texas officials say the amount of litter has been reduced by as much as a third since the start of this decade. Still, telephone surveys indicate that as many as 77 percent of Texans under the age of 25 admit to littering, and 55 percent of all Texans say they do.
ECOCE, Trevino's organization, began a television ad campaign several years ago aimed at shaming the public into taking care of trash.
Dubbed "no manches," which can loosely translate to "don't mess with," the effort featured children chastising people for tossing trash.
The ads, which had little apparent impact on public actions, have been discontinued for other campaigns.
"The trouble is, we're the only ones doing this sort of thing," Trevino said.
Still, there are some hopeful signs in Mexico.
A tiny market for recycled plastic bottles is growing, with most of the recovered plastic shipped to the United States and China for further processing.
Two years ago, ecotourism guides and a television network raised a ruckus about the trash clogging the Grijalva River inside the stunning Sumidero Canyon of the southernmost state of Chiapas.
Local, state and federal officials mobilized an army of workers to clean up the mess. More than 1,200 tons of garbage were collected from the narrow gorge in a few weeks. The officials claimed victory.
Today, news reports portray the river through the canyon as trashed out as ever.
"It's a war without end," said Marlene Ehrenberg, the Mexico City tour guide and environmentalist who first raised the alarm about the Sumidero.
"I'm so tired and fed up," she said.
dudley.althaus@chron.com
YES, it is called self-discipline and self-respect. Any of us could easily live like pigs and not be caught. But we choose not to. This guy thinks we don't litter for fear of being caught. He needs to visit us for a while. (Uh, stay out of some areas where people have no self-discipline and self-respect.)
Conquering the world via mucho anchor baby's?
I have and idea. Instead of taking our garbage to a landfill, we should just ship it to the areas of the US where the Mescans have taken over. Slip in at night, dump it in the streets, and slip on out.
Next morning, they won’t notice the difference.
I recall noticing huge amounts of trash dumped on railroad property the last time I rode the train into New York City. This was 15-20 years ago. It wasn't as bad as your description of Mexico though.
Before the era of prepackaged food, no place was like that. As recently as 20 years ago, Mexico had no littering problem because most people still ate fresh foods purchased at farmers markets rather than packaged food from supermarkets.Excellent post, monday. You have just explained so much of what is going on today. The world is in a flux as great as any since the opening of cross-Atlantic/Pacific trade routes by the Spanish and Portuguese. There's a tremendous clash of new technology with old perceptions, and it will be a long, long while for it to sort out.
To make it through this transition successfully, the U.S. must keep constant pressure on the rest of the world. If we don't lead, those who would interpret new things through old ways will.
It's third world thing.
Um ... That was 77 percent of Texans under 25. (and 55 percent of all Texans)
Not exactly.....
"Always" is a word that should rarely be used....
FWIW-
You got that right.
While I was reading this, I had a Hispanic walk in my office wanting to rent an apartment. He asked me what the requirements were to rent. I told him one of the requirements was that everyone had to be legal. He admitted with no shame or fear that he and his wife were not legal. (Why is my stomach in knots all of a sudden?)
One of the former Little League ballparks in Vista, CA, started out pretty decent, including adequate public bathrooms. The officials of the league were continually trying to educate the Latinos to put the used toilet paper INTO the toilet and flush it down. Usually, the Mexicans would just discard it on the floor. We were told by several Mexicans that because of bad plumbing where they came from, it was normal practice there NOT to flush the paper. Yeccchhhh. Needless to say, it was hard to get the LL board members to volunteer for bathroom cleaning duty.
“Litter choking streets throughout Mexico”
I have the Neil Diamond song “Coming to America” playing in my head.
Memorial Day, my wife & I were sitting on our front porch, early in the morning, when a Hispanic man rode up ito our driveway on his bicycle. In broken English he said he was “new” here and would like to know if we needed any yardwork or housework done. We said no, we do all our own work and he left. That has never happened to us before. I assumed he was from the house 3 down from us that is now a rental and has a whole new bunch of Latino people staying there.............
We've seen these people throw their entire lunch remains right out their windows.
It's disgusting how they are just trashing America.
This isn't ignorance, this is totally intentional, in your face trashing of America!
“And Bush wants us to turn our country over to these people.”
Jorge deserves a huge kick in the ass for this and for even considering closing down Gitmo, caving in (AGAIN) to the f**king anti-American leftists. The man needs to grow a pair.
More than a smattering of Mexican towns are garbage dumps!
amen to that!!!
Ok. I’ve seen that at WalMart too! Damn chinese! Er uh. Mexicans!
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