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

Maximum Garbage?

One tire on its way to the dump.

Take a look at the drama going on on Calle 24, behind the Central Cemetery, to get a feel for the absurdity - or nonexistence - of Bogotá's solid waste policy.

One by one, city workers are dropping old tires from windows or rolling them out of doors, then loading them into trucks to drive them an our outside the city...where they'll be dumped into a 'tire cemetery.' And they'll be at it for a good deal longer, judging from the piles of tires remaining inside the buildings.

The fate of used tires has been an ongoing crisis in Bogotá, especially since about a year ago, when an illegal tire dump caught fire, spewing toxic smoke which turned the city's air grey for days. City leaders vowed to take action...and held a series of meetings with tire industry representatives, which have come to nothing.

And another tire.

Of course the meetings came to nothing. The tire industry doesn't want to bother itself with the cost and trouble of the disposal of its products. And god forbid that the city would force them to. After all, that might create a precedent and make the producers of styrofoam containers, plastic bottles, cigarrettes, plastic bags and the innumerable other products which litter our streets, clog rivers and fill landfills fear that they too might have to take responsibility for the impacts of their products.

No need to observe that other cities have confronted these problems with deposit systems. But Mayor Petro persists with his fantasy that a p.r. campaign accomplish the same here. (Perhaps Petro doesn't want to offend the industrial interests which he hopes will support his campaign for president. God forbid.)

In fact, the tires were dumped into these vacant buildings by the city's UAESP, which is supposed to handle recycling, and whose slogan is 'Basura Cero' but should be 'Basura Maxima.' Now, these tires will sit in a dump where they might catch fire. And the tire avalanche continues, with no solution.

A few more left inside.

The best guarded tires in town.

Workers are walling up the buildings. Displaced people occupied one of them last week, exposing the illegal tire dump.

Sure thing.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Our Home for Used Tires

Displaced people wait on a Median Strip.

You'd be angry, too, if you were out on the street and your potential home was occupied by...discarded tires.

Displaced people tossed tires onto the sidewalk.
(Photo; El Tiempo)

That was why a group of people who said they'd been displaced by Colombia's violence occupied a vacant building behind the Central Cemetery today and tossed the used tires stored inside out into the street.

Workers move tires out of the building.
Where will they take them? To an illegal dump?

The situation captures the intersection of two Colombian disfunctions: the lack of solutions for people displaced by the internal armed conflict - some say that Colombia has up to six million displaced people, perhaps the second-largest number in the world. And Bogotá's inability to find a solution to the problem of used tires, which are tossed onto sidewalks, median strips and parks. In this case, this vacant building had been filled with old tires, which waited there for some homeless person to crawl inside, light a fire and start a viciously polluting conflagration. Other cities have found ways to reuse, or at least responsibly dispose of, used tires. But that costs money, and Bogotá officials don't want to offend the tire companies by forcing them to charge deposits.

As for the displaced people, they charge that the government has failed them on promises to provide new homes, and are demanding a solution.

Much of the building is still packed with tires, which generate huge pollution when burned.

A displaced man from El Chocó tells how he was driven from his home by paramilitaries.

Used tires wait on a sidwalk along 26th Street, near the National University.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Where Have All Those Tires Gone?

Just a few months ago, the used car and truck tires littering parks and sidewalks across Bogotá were making headlines: In particular, after an illegal lot with thousands of tires caught fire, turning the air grey for days.

Then, government and tire industry leaders - and apparently did nothing.

Recently, however, I seem to see fewer tires on the sidewalks, making me wonder where they've gone.

This pile of tire shreds near Calle 26...

....were helpfully covered up recently.

Then, one day, I happened to look thru a gap into this nondescript vacant building behind the Central Cemetery.

The building is packed with hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of used tires.

Waiting to burn.

One day, a homeless person will sneak in to sleep and light a fire; the tires will ignite and smolder for days, turning the sky grey. A few months ago, an unregulated tire dump caught fire and polluted Bogotá's air for days.

But there is a solution: Apply a deposit to tires (and many other waste products), creating an incentive for people to dispose of them properly, as well as a subsidy for processing them into, say, asphalt.


By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

A Tire Mountain Grows in Bogotá

Dozens, or hundreds, of discarded tires piled on a Caracas Ave. median in central Bogotá.

This mountain of used tires magically appeared, reportedly this morning, on the median strip of Caracas Ave. by Calle 17. Where they came from is a mystery, even tho they look like motorcycle tires, and a block away is one of the city's motorcycle districts, where tires are sold and changed. But that's no reason to think there's any connection.

Still, the tires are there, and will undoubtedly remain while more arrive, until someone sets fire to them, or our tax money pays for them to be hauled to a probably unregulated dump, where they'll breed mosquitoes until they eventually catch fire. In the 'best case', they'll end up in the city's Doña Juana landfill, which is almost full, despite Mayor Petro's ineffective 'Zero Garbage' program.

As we all can see, Bogotá's sidewalks, parks and streetcorners are becoming inundated with discarded car and motorcycle tires, while city officials look on passively, and fantasize that recycling programs are functioning.

What Bogotá needs to do is charge the tire industry for the disposal of its products. Each tire purchase would include a deposit, part of which would be returned when the tire is correctly disposed of. The rest of the deposit would pay for some recycling process, such as shredding the tires and incorporating the material into asphalt.

But will the supposedly environmentalist and sustainability-minded Mayor Petro put into action such a policy? Don't count on it, especially in an election year.

Scenes from the neighboring motorcycle district. Is it possible that the tires are coming from here?

Sleep tight, you motorcycles, in those comfortable pijamas.

Across Ave. Caracas, yet another tire pile, altho these look like car tires.

Near motorcycle alley, more tires pile up on a sidewalk.

According to El Tiempo, some 2.5 million used tires are generated annually by the city of Bogotá, of which 750,000 are discarded illegally.

As a public service, I've come up with some ideas about how to use those 2.5 million waste tires:

As footrests.

As bumpers.

For urban gardening.

To mark holes in streets and sidewalks, where covers have been stolen, so that people don't fall in.

As sidewalk sculptures.

As taller sidewalk sculptures.

As advertising, to sell more tires, which will end up on sidewalks.

To protect fire hydrants.

Great, now only 1,999,978 more tires to find uses for (not counting the ones discarded today).

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours