The End of the Trash Museum

Cyclists outside the Trash Museum back in the days of its full glory.

Bogotá's least popular anti-museum is no more.

The Trash Museum asks you what you're doing to the planet.

The Trash Museum, founded decades ago by the son of an upper-middle-class Bogotá family, became a regular stop on our bike tours, as well as a source of discord in its quiet Teusaquillo neighborhood.

As I heard the story, Antonio went to study in paris, where he rebelled against consumerism and wastefulness. He retunred hom, filled his family's house and yard with garbage. The museum became a landmark for bike tourists, but an eyesore for its neighbors, who at least once tried get to get Antonio evicted.

The house's front 'yard' was hidden behind a jumble of paper, plastic, boards and old shoes, decorated

'We are the trash culture!'

with signs denouncing mankind's wastefulness and announcing the planet's environmental collapse. 'How many of these objects came from your house?' asked one hand-scrawled sign. 'This is the way the world is,' announced another.

Passers-by contributed their own pieces of trash and even wrote their own statements. Sometimes, Antonio left his front door wide open, for anybody to enter and experience the museum's trash-packed interior, where he actually hosted friends.

The 'museum' even attained a degree of officialness. It was on Googe Maps and received an award from the Ministry of the Environment for environmental education.

"He was strong; a straight shooter." Antonio's brother gives us the sad news. But I suspect that the neighbors were relieved. 

A daring tourist ventures into the museum.

And Antonio certainly had his admirers, including his brother, who described him as "strong" and "a real straight shooter."

But, as much as I agree with Antonio's ideas - Bogotá's streets, sidewalks and waterways are strewn with paper and plastic from unnecessary packaging left over from mostly unnecessary products, which will either end up rotting in the Doña Juana landfill or float into the ocean, where animals will swallow it and choke to death.

A recognition from
the Ministry of
the Environment.

But Antonio, with his ways of antagonizing people, was not the best messenger. And I´m not sure whether his 'museum' was the product of principle, or just the rationalization of laziness. After all, Antonio spent his time indoors drinking himself to death.

Neither was he a particuarly pleasant person. Once when I stopped in front of the house with a bike
tour, Antonio Emerged from a amidst his trash and greeted us with an 'Heil Hitler.'

Later, we asked him what he did for a living.

"I'm the new Adolph Hitler," he told us.

About ten days ago, Antonio died, most probably from all of his drinking. His brother is clearing out his house and yard - a monumental task - and plans to rent out the property. Check it out soon on air BnB.

Hard at work clearing out the museum.

Ready to cart away the trash.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

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

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

Plastic Everywhere, and No Solution in Sight

Before the plastic bag tax: Carrying plastic bags (probably full of more plastic bags) home from the supermarket.

After the bag tax: the more things change, the more they stay the same: Carrying plastic bags (probably full of more plastic bags) home from the supermarket.

Sackss of plastic bags and other trash in the Plaza San Victorino.

Nobody doubts that plastic bags are a problem. They little streets, plazas and parks, trash up rivers and clog sewers. And a lot of them end up in the ocean, where animals swallow them and choke to death. And then there are all the petroleum resources used to manufacture the bags, and the pollution generated during the process. All to make something which is often used just once, for a short time, and then discarded.

So, give Bogotá officials credit for recognizing the problem. If only they would try an effective solution.

First came 'educational' measures for stores. Some neighborhood stores put up signs encouraging customers to bring their own bags - which almost everybody ignored.

Worth something?

Then, on July 1 a bag tax kicked in - of 20 pesos -  or 6/10 of one U.S. penny. Nobody bothers to pick a 20 peso coin up off the street, nor do people carry them, making this tax meaningless. So, unless the same customer uses five bags, he likely won't get charged at all. At the same time, I don't see any practical way the DIAN can monitor how many plastic bags a store uses. (Expect a black market in plastic bags). So, stores will simply pass on to all of their customers the tax bill for the bags they report using, eliminating the tax's incentive quality.

The tax didn't discourage this shopper from packing her
shopping cart with bags filled with more bags.

All of this makes about as much sense as Colombia's policy to reduce carbon generation, in which the country simultaeneously taxes carbon to discourage its use, and also subsidizes fuel consumption and encourages oil and coal production.

It's no wonder that plastic bag habits are tough to change. Not only are plastic bags convenient, but a friend points out that giving them out has become a 'social gesture.' I couldn't count the number of times that a seller has chased after me or literally cried out in protest when I rejected his or her offer of a completely useless plastic bag to carry home a single apple, a candy bar or a box of aspirin. But the bag came from somebody's heart.

Taxes have effectively reduced plastic bag use in Ireland, some U.S. cities, and other localesbcxi. But those places have stronger legal systems and lower rates of corruption and black markets.

Perhaps a bag tax would work here if the government either enforced it using sting operations, or actually taxed the newly-manufactured bags.

'Please bring your own bag.' This sign, in a shop in La Candelaria, was removed once employees realized that the pllastic bag decree wouldn't be enforced.

A sign in a shop implores customers to save the planet by bringing their own bags.
Notice the woman's hand giving a customer a bag.

City workers hand out reuseable bags in La Candelaria. They gave the bags to anybody willing to sign for them, whether they needed them or not.

A proud woman with her free bags.

This older woman scored two bags. But will she ever use them? Could she actually carry one full of stuff?

The La Panamericana stores seem to have taken real measures. Here, a sign at the checkout counter saying they no longer will give out bags smaller than 30 by 30 cms.

Canvas bags for sale in La Panamericana.

The bag rule doesn't apply to neighborhood corner shops and traditional markets like this one.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

The Trash Museum: A Monument to Wastefullness

Bike tourists on a drizzly day outside the 'Garbage Museum' in Teusaquillo.

'Cosmic suicide will awaken us from lethargy.' Thoreau.

Talk about turning a vice into a virtue. The resident of a house on a quiet corner in Teusaquillo evidently liked collecting discarded stuff - but not cleaning up. Over the years, his house and yard filled with the results of his habit, turning the lot into something like a city dump, to the great delight, undoubtedly, of his neighbors.

When you've made a mess of things, it's good to paint it as a matter of principle. Thus, the trash museum has signs pointing out how wasteful and resource-greedy humans are. 'Did some of these objects come from your house?' asks one sign. Another advises 'Think before you buy,' and a third warns of cosmic collapse. He's also got a sophisticated website.

The trash museum, if that's what it is, makes an important point about humanity's wastefullness. And particularly in a city which does little recycling, and, more importantly, makes no effort to reduce the amount of waste produced, in the first place.

A discarded doll inside the house.

The trash museum's trashy entranceway.

'We are the garbage culture.'

N ice flowers!

'Think before you buy.'

'What are you doing?'

The front of the garbage museum, on a corner in Teusaquillo.

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