Of Trash and Traffic Jams

Homeless men pick thru garbage outside the
Las Nieves fruit market.

Bogotá has two severe and worsening problems:

Too much trash, and too much traffic. We've all seen the huge piles of garbage on corners, which may have decreased, by haven't disappeared now that the city has supposedly got a new company collecting its waste.

And, just a few days ago, Bogotá's traffic congestion was ranked the second worst in all of South America.

A huge -and routine - traffic jam on Calle 26
in central Bogotá. Wluld a congestion charge help?

Bogotá has attempted futiley to address both crisis with a simple formula: Provide more space. It has expanded the Doña Juana landfill, and even talked about establishing a second one. And, it has spent many billions of pesos expanding urban avenues and intersections, only to have thousands of additional cars crowd those new spaces.

Unfortunately, increasing supply of something only generates more production, leaving the problem as bad or worse.

In the case of Bogotá's garbage, residents who toss trash onto corners and sidewalks have no limit to what they dispose of and no incentive to reduce the waste they produce.

The city's perpetual entreaties to recycle have accomplished little. And recycling is a poor solution compared to not producing the garbage in the first place.

Carrying plastic bottles - which will be used once and discarded - to a store.
Would a deposit keep them out of the landfill?
Would it discourage their use in the first place?

Bags of organic waste. How about paying flower growers to buy them and turn them into compost? That would save space in the landfill while also reducing greenhouse gas pollution.

Tires discarded behind the Central Cemetery. In many places, a deposit paid when a tire is purchased pays for its later reprocessing into something else.

And, in the case of traffic, studies have repeatedly shown that increasing road space only lures more drivers onto the roads.

A garbage truck painted with a slogan urging people
to place recyclables into white bags.

In both cases, the city shoulds employ economic incentives to motivate residents to change their behavior.

An obvious one is a deposit on tires, bottles and other disposable items, which would be used to pay
consumers to return those objects to be reused or recycled, and finance their reprocessing into something useful. The beauty of a deposit is that it also shifts the costs to the products' users instead of society in general.

Recycling sounds idealistic, but is much less environmentally sound than simply not generating waste in the first place. And, most of Bogotá's recycling programs are disfunctional, anyway. Take a peek into most recycling bins, and you'll see regular trash in all of them. And the trash collectors have only one place to dump the contents, anyway. The city urges residents separate recyclables from regular trash and place them in white bags. Nobody does this - and for good reason, since the trash collectors have no separate place to carry recyclables, anyway. And even if people did separate out their recyclables, dogs and homeless people would come by and rip open the bags and scatter the trash, anyway.

And the best way to reduce traffic congestion is to raise driving's cost, by hiking the cost of gasoline or introducing a London-style congestion charge for driving into the center of the city. Bogotá's Pico y Placa law, which prohibits cars from driving three days per week depending on their license plate numbers, has obviously failed to reduce traffic jams, and may even be making them worse.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Bolívar Loses His Sword - Once Again

Simon Bolivar, swordless, on Plaza Bolivar.

In January 1974, the M-19 guerrillas introduced themselves to Colombia with a dramatic gesture: They invaded the Quinta de Bolívar in La Candelaria and stole Libertador Simon Bolivar's sword.

Simon's swordless
sword hand.

With the sort of dramatic, media-friendly flourish the M-19 were known for, they then announced
that 'Bolivar's sword had returned to battle' - presumably for democracy, sovereignty and social justice.

In the M-19's hands, the sword seems to have been hidden in a brothel, in the homes of various Colombian artists and intellectuals, and then smuggled to revolutionary Cuba. Meanwhile, after several more dramatic actions, the M-19's career turned tragic in 1985 when its assault on the Justice Palace became a bloodbath.

When the M-19 signed a peace treaty with the government and demobilized in 1991, its leaders gave back to the Colombian nation what they claimed was the same sword they had stolen.

Today may be a less dramatic and idealistic time for Coombia. So, perhaps appropriately, one of Bolivar's swords was stolen last week, apparently for much more pragmatic reasons.

A missing manhole cover on Plaza San Victorino, which someone has covered with a piece of concrete.

The sword in question this time is the one on Plaza Bolivar, in front of City Hall, the Supreme Court and Congress. But, rather than a symbol of revolution, this blade apparently was taken to a scrap dealer, who tossed it onto a heap of metal to be melted down.

It's a mystery how the sword was stolen on Colombia's most important public plaza, which is

A plastic non-recyclable manhole cover
on Jimenez Ave., near where a girl fell thru
and drowned several years ago.

patrolled by guards and monitored by cameras. Authorities vowed to capture the culprit.

Sadly, the incident was no aberration. In Bogotá, virtually any piece of metal which can be picked up or ripped away from its moorings will be, often by crack addicts desperate to buy another hit.

The other day, the doorhandle disappeared from our house. A few years ago, when I lived around the corner, someone ripped stole our metal plate house number.

Unfortunately, metal theft can cause more than just inconvenience. A couple of years ago, a little girl fell into a manhole whose cover had been stolen and drowned in an underground river.

In a city with lots of poverty and drug addiction and poor law enforcement, this is not an easy problem to solve. But authorities could make selling stolen scrap more difficult by doing sting operations. Since nobody has the right to sell a city manhole cover, any scrap dealer who buys one is committing a crime, and should have his business shut down.

Several years ago, someone stole one of Saint Frances de Assisi's adoring animals from a plaza in north Bogotá. Was the poor metal deer melted down?

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

The Troubles with Doña Juana

Trash piled high on Jimenez Ave. today. 

Few Bogotanos have ever seen Doña Juana, and many probably haven't even heard of her. But every one of us interacts with Juana every day, many times, each time we discard a piece of trash.

Doña Juana is the city's landfill,

Recycling bins outside the Paloquemao market.
The market does actually compost its organic wastes,
but I suspect that other 'recyclables' end up in the landfill.

In case you thought you've seen even more trashpiles on the streets than normal, you're not hallucinating. Doña Juana's neighbors have blocked the landfill's access roads in protest against the profusion of flies and rats around the landfill.

The neighbors also want the city to build a trash classification facility by the landfill, where recyclable materials could be recovered - and which would mean employment for them. Bogotá recycles only a tiny amount of its waste.

Recycling is good, but better still would be reducing the amount of material sent to the landfill in the first place. The recent law taxing disposable plastic bags seems to have made some difference. A similar tax on other disposable packaging, such as plastic bottles, would be another good step.

A typical scene: Trash inside '
recycling' bins. 

Instead, since land is cheap, the city will just once again expand the dump's boundaries, and these environmental conflicts will repeat themselves.

These plastic bottles will become trash after one use, and fill up the landfill.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Recyclers Fear for their Profession

Recyclers protest on Jimenez Ave., in La Candelaria.

These recyclers, or trash pickers, object to Decree 596, passed a few years ago, which is supposed to formalize the recyclers' work. However, the resolution requires recyclers to form themselves into associations in order to sell what they collect. It also enables large companies to bid for recycling contracts - which trash pickers fear will put them out of business.

The city also plans to create several trash classification stations, where things like paper, plastic, glass and metals are to be separated for recycling. The informal recyclers fear being cut out of the process, altho city officials assert that they will be included.

A businessman, and presumably and exploiter of the poor recyclers.

Ridiculing 'Ciudad Limpia,' one of the corporate traash collectors.

'Down with Decree 596!'

'Now that trash is valuables, we recyclers are trash.'

A recycling family.

'Recyclers united against the public bidding.'

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Recycling a Bad Idea

Labeled recycling bins in Paloquemao Market. They all contain the same random trash.

Beginning next year, Bogotanos will be required to classify their trash for recycling. It's a great plan - and looks doomed to fail, just as Mayor Petro's similar plan failed before.

Why bother? It all goes to
the same place, anyway.

A visitor to Bogotá might be impressed by the receptacles in shops, parks and markets carefully Organic,' 'Inorganic' and 'Ordinario' trash. But look inside, and he'll probably see that all three bins contain the same miscelaneous garbage, and if he waits around he'll see that all the material goes into the same truck and heads to the same landfill.
labeled '

Recently, I talked to a young woman who teaches in a public high school. She spent a lot of time instructing the children how to separate recyclables from ordinary trash and place them in the correct bins. So, she was horrified one evening when she watched the janitor dump all the bins together.

"Don't do that!" she exclaimed.

"Why not?" the janitor replied. "All of it goes to the same place, anyway."

Classify this!

That's one big reason why recycling's doomed here. Another is the way garbage disposal works across much of the capital; You carry your sacks of garbage - classified or not - onto the sidewalk and leave them there for the truck to come around. Promptly, dogs or homeless people appear and rip the sacks open and dump the contents onto the sidewalk and sift thru them to something to eat or sell.

Fortunately, there's a much better way to reduce Bogotá's trash production and decrease its environmental impact, but unfortunately the city show's no willingness to employ it: Make producing garbage cost money. 

If these bags cost money, this guy would get a reusable one.

This is simple enough to do, by taxing things like throw-away plastic bags (which taxes have reduced

bag use by as much as 90% in places such as Ireland), and placing deposits on things like cans and tires. The consumer gets the most of the desposit back by delivering the used product to a recyling center and the rest of the deposit money finances the recycling. Such policies have succeeded in places in North America and Europe.

Instead, in yet another useless law, Bogotá intends to require those single use disposable bags to carry environmental messages. How nice.

The good news: These plastic bags may soon carry environmental messages.

A truck full of plastic bottles, soon headed for the landfill. A deposit law would encourage the soda companies to  adopt resusable bottles.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

How to Not Recycle the Bogotá Way

Don't worry. They'll soon be in an empty lot or public park near you.

Want to condemn a recycling program to failure? Try this:

Take a group of people known for limited education and zero environmental awareness but a great capacity for drinking beer and ogling women, and put them in charge of carrying out an environmental program.

The result is predictably a disaster - which is the situation Bogotá is in.

Will they catch fire?

Thank such good planning for the piles of tires on our sidewalk, and carcinogenic tire smoke in our lungs. Did you enjoy the other week's used tire fire, which turned our air gray? Count on Bogotá's environmental policy bureaucrats ensuring it happens again!

The city has no rational disposal system for the tens of thousands of used tires produced each year, which litter public parks and sidewalks. A few weeks ago, a dump containing more than 100,000 used tires caught fire, poisoning the air for days. According to Elaw.com, tire smoke is some 13,000 times more cancer-causing than pollution from a coal plant equipped with emissions controls.


You probably haven't heard of Bogotá's EcoPuntos program, and there are good reasons why: the city hasn't publicized it and it barely functions.

Could those tires on the sidewalk around the
corner have come from here?

Bogotá's EcoPuntos program, supposedly involves 92 spots across the city where people can drop off used tires for proper disposal or recycling. Of course, it seems that those tires just get tossed into unregulated dumps, where they breed mosquitoes and eventually catch fire. But, no matter.

And, Bogotá City Councilman Diego García, a member of the Green Alliance party, visited a dozen of those designated drop-off points and found that half didn't know about the program and others didn't have anyplace to store old tires. Only one of the dozen sites actually accepted tires. But, no matter.

The real flaw in this system is its lack of incentives.

EcoPuntos everywhere, but nobody's seen them.

How many environmental idealists do you think Bogotá has willing to lug a heavy tire across town to dispose of it correctly -  for free? And how many of those people work in tire shops?

As is evident on many Bogotá sidewalks, tire shops find it easier to toss their waste tires around the corner, where they become the public's problem.

The only solution here are economic incentives.

Consider two scenarios.

Scenario No. 1, Bogotá's existing disfunctional system: A bunch of guys are sitting around a tire shop one afternoon scratching their balls. The boss asks:

Deposit your can here, and feel good
about producing garbage.

'Hey guys, who wants to load those old tires out back into the truck and drive them across town for ecologically proper disposal?'

Tire shop employees look around awkwardly, scratch their balls and ponder the pin-up girls on the walls. They suddenly recall urgent commitments they have for that afternoon.

'Alright', says the boss, impatiently; 'We've gotta get rid of those tires. Someone load them up and get them out of my sight! Remember that dumping them in the park or on the sidewalk is against the law - but I won't ask any questions.'

Tire shop workers grumble, load up the tires and return 15 minutes later, the problem solved.

Scenario No. 2, with economic incentives: In this case, the tire industry pays a small deposit for each tire imported or manufactured in Colombia. That deposit goes into a public fund. Upon delivering the used tire for proper disposal, part of the deposit is returned.

Back in the tire shop, with used tires piling up in the corner.

350,000 bottles is a tiny proportion of the
millions used by Bogotanos each week.
Better not to have used
them at all. 

'Who wants to take these tires off to be disposed of?' the boss asks.

The shop employees stop scratching their balls and look up with interest.

'The desposit's all yours,' the boss adds.

The shop employees envision beer money, a date with their girlfriend, perhaps even buying the kids' schoolbooks. Hands shoot up all over the room.

'Hey boss! I'll take those tires away!'

The shop guys compete to load up the tires and drive them to a collection point, where an employee eagerly receives them, knowing that he'll also get a deposit for delivering them to a disposal point.

The rest of the deposit goes to subsidize some use for the old tires, such as shredding them to be used as road material or burning in a cement plant.

That same mechanic who's been using the neighborhood park as his dumping ground, has now become an environmentalist - not because he loves the planet, but because it fills his pockets.

The EcoPuntos program has another part, only slightly less perverse.

Those are reverse vending machines located in some Bogotá malls, into which people drop used beverage containers to receive 'EcoPuntos', which are supposed to be good for something. The percentage of bottles thus returned is infinitesimal. Still, hopefully, those bottles do get reused instead of ending up in the dump.

Unfortunately, however, the consumer walks away from the EcoPuntos machine with a positive feeling that he or she has done something good for the planet, when all he's done is delay the bottle's trip to the dump. Much better would have been not to use that can or bottle at all, especially since it probably contained something either useless, such as bottled water (the tap water here is perfectly potable), or a sugary soft drink which only did its drinker harm.







By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Use it Once and Throw it Out

El Tiempo reports, on the lower left, that Bogotá will host a sustainability conference, and on the upper right that Bogotá is expanding its landfill, named Doña Juana.

Does this make sense? Tossing
garbage into a 'Zero Garbage' truck.

I got a good sarcastic laugh the other day about this coincidence of headlines. On the lower left-hand side, El Tiempo reports that Bogotá is to host the Río + 20 conference on sustainable development. On the upper right: proof that Bogotá is not sustainable: it's expanding its dump, rather than reducing, reusing or recycling its garbage.

Garbage policy has marked Mayo Gustavo Petro's administration. Earlier this year, the procurador got Petro temporarily ousted because the mayor had supposedly endangered public health by mismanaging garbage collection. Now, there are fewer mountains of trash on the sidewalk - but the mountains of trash are piling up in the city's landfill, Doña Juana. Much of that material consists of packaging that was used once, but will fill the landfill for thousands of years. Other stuff could be reused, composted or recycled - but filling the landfill - if only the city bothered.

A Bogotá official boasted that the Rio + 20 conference is proof of the city's green policies.

A 'Zero Garbage' garbage truck, full of garbage.

I'd suggest that once the conference attendees see the city's enormous, smog-spewing traffic jams, they'll ask why the city has not instituted a traffic congestion charge or created high-occupancy vehicle lanes. If they take a whiff of the Rio Bogotá, they might ask why, despite plan after plan and multiple court orders, the river's still an open sewer. And, god forbid visitors should visit the Doña Juana landfill, because then they'd ask why Bogotá lacks an effective recycling program or policies to discourage the use of styrofoam, disposable bottles and other one-use landfill-packing materials.
The Petro administration's main contribution to revolutionizing Bogotá's garbage policy has been to write 'Zero Garbage' on the city's trucks, uniforms and even garbage bags.

According to an interview with a Dutch solid waste official, Holland recycles 80% of its waste and incinerates an additional 18% to generate energy. Bogotá's statistics are almost the opposite: it recycles only 3.9% of its solid waste, according to El Espectador.

The key to Holland's success, says the visiting official, is to make manufacturers and retailers financially responsible for their products' waste material.

A stuffed full 'Zero Garbage' trash bag.

A worker in a 'Zero Garbage' uniform collects garbage on Ave. Septima.

Plastic drink bottles, generally used just once and then thrown away, are filling up the city's landfill. These pop drinks aren't good for us or for the environment, but the city subsidizes their use by doing the manufacturers the favor of carrying them away and disposing them for free.

Why doesn't Bogotá tax their use, as some other cities have? What about a plastic bag tax or even a ban?

How much space will these stacks of plastic bottles occupy in the landfill?

Stacks of styrofoam-packaged lunches for sale in the Universidad Nacional. Tomorrow, the packages will be in the landfill, where they'll stay for a thousand years.

Some cities have prohibited styrofoam packaging, In Bogotá, it's ubiquitous.

Styrofoam packaging spills out of a trash can on La Candelaria's 'Environmental Axis' avenue.

Sacks of organic garbage wait for collection near the Parque Nacional. This stuff could all be composted - but don't expect it to be.

Trash cans by any other name. Labeled recycling bins in Parque de la Independencia.

And here's Bogotá recycling - no thanks to the city.

A man, likely a homeless drug addict, sifts thru trash on Plaza San Victorino for anything that's usable. 

A little while later, the area is cleaner.

This old man works every day along Ave. Septima, collecting cardboard and wood to resell.

He could teach the city father's a lesson.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours