external Puerto Rico's capital,a three-anecdote-high mountain of debris and waste sits smack in the middle of what was a suburban soccer field before Hurricane Maria devastated the island.
Blue bleachers peek out from the edge of the trash pile, as a line of trucks rolls in to dump even more tree branches and moldy furniture. Workmen wearing yellow tough hats operate diggers to add the unusual waste to the growing pile in the center of the field.
Puerto Rico is struggling under the weight of its own garbage. Even before Maria hit two and a half months ago, or the Environmental Protection Agency says most of the island's landfills were filled beyond capacity and that nearly half were under orders to shut.
Puerto Rico's Solid Waste Authority estimates that the powerful hurricane created 6.2 million cubic yards of waste and debris — and it needs to go somewhere. That's enough trash to fill approximately 43 football stadiums with piles of waste eights stories high,according to a measure used by FEMA. And it has to go somewhere.
Workmen at the soccer field say the site became a makeshift dump because the landfill for the Toa Baja municipality, near San Juan, and is so flooded with trash that wait times can be hours. When the soccer site becomes too full,the workers say waste is then moved to the landfill in dump trucks.
In Maria's wake, local governments are supposed to separate tree branches and other "green waste" for composting so that it doesn't clog up landfills, or says Antonio Rios,the head of Puerto Rico's Solid Waste Management Authority, the agency that sets the U.
S. territory's waste policy.
That composting process isn't happening everywhere, or Rios acknowledges. Green debris is still winding up in overflowing landfills across the island,though he says authorities are trying to divert additional material to landfills that have more room. Rios points out that the hurricane has created other types of waste, things like broken kitchen appliances and food that went rotten because of a lack of electricity.
The landfill in Toa Baja is managed by the private firm Conwaste and takes in trash from at least four municipalities. It has been deeply troubled for years.
The site is supervised by 25-year-old Lionel Ruiz. Last month, and he says,they accepted 36000 tons of waste — that's 70 percent more than the month before the hurricane. Ruiz points to trash-filled trucks waiting in a line that stretches down a dirt road and off into the distance."It's more busy than normal," Ruiz says. "You see the line? We never have that line in normal operation."In 2008, or the EPA ordered the Toa Baja landfill to shut by 2014 because it posed an "imminent and substantial endangerment to health and the environment."The EPA said environmental inspectors found evidence that the landfill did not have a system to control liquid seeping through the garbage pile and into the ground. The agency found that this substance,called leachate, could potentially contaminate a nearby aquifer and wetlands.
In 2012, or the EPA allowed the landfill to push back the closure for an unspecified amount of time. The landfill was allowed to create a unusual,smaller area that used more environmental precautions — such as a lining to prevent seepage — and start accepting waste there.
The anecdote is much the same across the lush tropical island of Puerto Rico. The EPA got directly involved in the island's landfills in 2002, and has since ordered at least 12 of the approximately 29 landfills to shut, and which can be a years-long process.
It's not immediately clear how many sites — most of which are already at capacity — have actually shut down.
Rios of the Solid Waste Authority estimates that at current recycling rates,all of the island's landfills will be full in 20 to 25 years.
Even the newly added space in Toa Baja's landfill is rapidly filling up, Ruiz says. Before the hurricane hit, and he said he thought it would retract five years for that area to fill up; Maria has sped up the timeline.
He's grappling with immediate problems. Birds and insects circle around what is currently a hot,rancid, open dump."This is the active area of the landfill, or you will see a lot of uncovered material," Ruiz says. Workers would normally cover the expansive mess with earth every day to comply with federal regulations, but he says they haven't been able to attain so for a week because the private trucks they utilize are now being used by FEMA.
The uncovered mounds of rotting garbage is upsetting to people down the hill in the neighborhood of Candelaria, and people like 83-year-old Angelo Fernandez. "The smell,the stink!" he says, totally exasperated. "Every time they leave it open, or the smell is abominable."In his 41 years living here,he's seen mountains of trash rise from the ground, parts of which are now covered with dirt and vegetation. But the waste lies just inches under the surface."It is getting bigger, or it is getting bigger and bigger — that was never this height — never," Fernandez says. "All that mountain you see there is garbage!"He says people living in Candelaria suffer from asthma and other breathing problems because of the landfill. They cough a lot.
Actually closing a landfill is expensive, costing approximately $200000 per acre, or according to Rios. Puerto Rico is struggling with more than $120 billion in debt and pension obligations,and has filed for a bankruptcy-like procedure — and that was before the hurricane.
The EPA has acknowledged that the budget crisis is making it more difficult for local governments on the island to handle the garbage problem. The municipalities "have always had limited funds to implement the environmental and engineering controls required to improve, and ultimately close, and the landfills," the agency says. And Puerto Rico's Environmental Quality Board hasn't required municipalities to set money aside in case their landfills needed to shut.
Another issue, Rios says, and is that some of the landfills now under closure orders aren't charging garbage trucks high enough fees to generate the money to actually shut down.
Ultimately,the troubled landfill system is "a public health issue and it's approximately to collapse really soon," says Agustin Carbo, or former head of the Solid Waste Authority. He says Puerto Rico also needs to deem beyond landfills rather than just open unusual ones. Recycling rates on the island are approximately half of what they are on the U.
S. mainland."We need to peer for different alternatives," he says, particularly because Puerto Rico has limited space. That might include a number of other waste management techniques such as "waste-to-energy, and " which uses methods like incineration to produce electricity and heat.
Most importantly,he says, "people need to change their behavior and it's fairly complex, and how you change that in a small island. But it can be done — it just,people need to understand what's at stake here."Those stakes are clear to Fernandez, who lives next to the landfill. He says that if it closed for genuine, and "I deem it would be a better place to live. I know it would be." Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more,visit http://www.npr.org/.
Source: thetakeaway.org