Newyon Blogs

    June 2023

The Invisibility of garbage in Latin America: 

 A Crisis.

The population of Latin America is approximately 600,000,000. If we assume that the per capita generation of solid waste is .7 kg per person, Latin America generates 420,000 metric tons per day of municipal solid waste. More importantly, this tsunami of garbage is out of control with at least 90% going to illegal polluting dumps, directly into waterways and even in the streets. 

Vertederos or dumps exist in Latin America but without either ground water protection or daily cover. As a result, an estimated 14,000 metric tons per day of methane (CH4) and carbon dioxide (CO2) are released into the atmosphere due to rotting biomass. [1] If this environmental disaster was occurring everyday in the United States or the European Union, a Super Fund site would be declared, and immediate remediation would be recommended. Unfortunately, environmental disasters are invisible in Latin America.

Because the developed world is myopic in the search for both blame and tax revenues regarding climate change, the environmental disaster of out of control dumping in Latin America is inconvenient because there is not money available for academic studies so there is little interest. Thus, if the academy and local governments have little interest, why should any other entities?

Biomass is energy and it is renewable and green if properly processed. If all the polluting biomass in Latin America was turned into thermal energy and then electrical energy, the result would be approximately 13,000MW/hr or 16% of the total energy consumption in Latin America.[2] This combats both climate change by eliminating 14,000 metric tons per day of greenhouse gases while concurrently protecting ground water and eliminating a major health risk. 

Pursuing solutions to climate change while at the same time developing existing technologies to stop gross solid waste polluting practices are not mutually exclusive. However, we are teaching the youth of Latin America to walk through a mountain of garbage to deliver a lecture on climate change. This has to change!

If a problem is invisible, why bother? If there is not any perceived human or environmental cost to pollution, why bother?

Why? Because pollution causes climate change and pollution kills!

[1] www.epa.gov Basic Information about Landfill Gases. September 2021.

[2]Internal estimate. 1.2MW/year per capita or 82,000MW/Hr.