Water Treatment & Alternative Technology

The contrast between our two visits this week illustrates probably one of the greatest dilemmas for a person working in social justice or environmentalist movements: when are we curing the disease, and when are we just treating the symptoms? On Friday, we visited ECCACIV, a water treatment plant with the motto “It is not just another business, it is a commitment with the environment.” This plant treats mainly the contaminated water from the industrial park north east of Cuernavaca, before it is dumped into a nearby river. The harshest chemical in the entire treatment process is chlorine gas; the rest of the decontamination is done with microorganisms and oxygenation. Unfortunately, this process cannot remove a specific red dye from the textile factory, so that stays in the river and kills the plant life and fish. This red dye does not have any environmental regulations put on it as of yet. Our guide said it was a way in which the government is protecting the textile industry. ECCACIV has asked nicely for the textile factory to stop using that dye, or do some sort of pre-treatment of the water, but (surprisingly) they have not agreed to that.
I think we can all agree that water treatment is good, and that we shouldn’t just dump contaminated water into the river, but what if we didn’t create contaminated water in the first place? On Tuesday, we visited the house of eco-architect César Añorve and heard his opinion on water management. “Sewage is crazy,” he said. With the dry toilet and the bio-filter for soap and other contaminants of household water, he does not need to send his water anywhere to be treated. Nor does contaminated water from his house flow into any of Cuernavaca’s many ravines, which is common for other households.
Obviously, the water issue is not strictly environmental. The social implications of water contamination and especially unequal access to water are blatant in Mexico. The privatization of water, for example, is already in its advanced stages. Making water into a commodity to be bought and sold, a large sector of the population who don’t have the money to buy water is cut off from a necessity of life.
As environmentalists and/or social justice advocates, we need to stop lamenting the state of our world and start acting at the source of its problems. What if instead of funding a project to connect a community to a sewage system, it funded dry toilets, bio-filters and rain water collection tanks? Maybe Bechtel, one of the multinational companies involved in the water business, could take a workshop from Cesar Añorve and still get the contract.

Solid Waste Management & Privatization

This week, our class visits focused largely on the issue of trash management, a topic with great current relevance to Cuernavaca and its surrounding municipalities. Last summer, the residents of two communities outside of Cuernavaca, Alpuyeca and Tetlama, united to protest the government and force the closure of an open air landfill in Tetlama, the site which had received the daily trash produced by Cuernavaca and four other municipalities for the past 35 years. As a result of not being able to use the Tetlama landfill to store all of its trash, trash accumulated in the streets of Cuernavaca. City residents, concerned with the trash piling in the streets, demanded another system of trash management and storage. After arranging to temporarily send the city’s trash to Mexico City, the municipal government has since struggled to improve its system of trash management.

We had the opportunity this week to speak with members of the municipal government involved with environmental decision-making, visit the landfill in Tetlama, and speak with community representatives that participated in the resistance movement.

On Friday, SJGELA met with José Juan Tovilla, Secretary of Public Services and the Environment for the city of Cuernavaca. We also spoke with the municipal director of ecology and a coordinator of environmental education in Cuernavaca. They described a system of ecological inspection and vigilance in the city and discussed government efforts to improve environmental education within Cuernavaca. Workshops that, for example, teach participants how to recycle paper or how to start a compost program are open to the public and are designed to improve environmental consciousness. As well, they informed us about the current system of trash management and the government’s recent decision to contract a private company, Promotora Ambiental (PASA), to take over trash collection and treatment. They also explained the decision to create a new landfill in an area of San Antón, the colonia in which our school is located. This new landfill, they argued, would handle all of Cuernavaca’s trash for the next twenty years. Throughout their presentation, they stressed that they were representatives of a new government that had received the trash problem from the previous administration, but that they were planning to resolve it.

In our visit to Tetlama, we discussed the importance of the geological layout in determining landfill sites. Taking what we had learned from Laura Kuri’s presentation on water runoff, it was evident that the runoff from the Tetlama landfill most directly impacted the town of Alpuyeca. Hipólito García, a community leader in Tetlama who was integral in the struggle to close the landfill, told us that the people of Alpuyeca are the most affected by the negative health impacts of the landfill because they live at the bottom of the landfill. He noted that Alpuyeca has a surprisingly high rate of cancer, a result, many suspect, is the result of pollution caused by the landfill. As well, the group discussed the side effects of placing a landfill above critical water sources, leading to questions about the possibility of a new landfill in San Antón, an area with many ravines that connect to water sources for many people.

Hipólito García also spoke to us about the social and environmental resistance effort in Tetlama. He felt that government officials never enforced the regulations they had promised, that the landfill had never been properly managed, and that secrecy on behalf of the government had contributed to many frustrations within the town. Men, women, and children united in Tetlama to block a back passage to the landfill and prevent the government from forcing garbage trucks into the disposal site. He further described the struggle as one not only for the inhabitants of Tetlama, but one for other communities as well. García stated that the resistance movement was greatly strengthened by unification with other towns and activist groups.

The visit to the Tetlama—the drive through the old disposal site and our dialogue with town representatives--was very moving because although we have highlighted the consumption of Cuernavaca and its current struggle to design an effective and safe solid waste management program, trash management is a universal issue that every community faces every day. It is easy to detach oneself from the issue of solid waste disposal if trash is collected by a garbage truck and stored outside of one’s community. Seeing the trash in the old open air landfill was extremely moving because consumption and trash production are processes in which everyone engages. Many of us do not know where our trash goes or who lives around those trash disposal sites. To actually view a landfill where such trash is stored and speak with community members forced to deal with the consequences forges a unique consciousness about the impacts of individual waste production.

In class sessions throughout the week, we spent time discussing the role of social movements in democratic systems of governance. Speaking with two representatives of the movement in Tetlama and Alpuyeca provided a living example of community organization as a form of exercising citizenship. During our week we also discussed the injustices of trash management and the possibility of environmental racism in the placement of hazardous storage sites: Tetlama, for example, is an indigenous community and it was selected as a site for an open air landfill. It was evident that the social struggle in these two communities was intricately linked to the natural environment. The close location of the landfill, its inadequate regulation, and the pollution and contamination that resulted were among the main contributing factors that motivated the social resistance in Tetlama. Through organization, its citizens were able to challenge government policy to force consideration of a more just system of management.

Our Local Environment

During this past week we had the opportunity to meet with two progressive environmentalists. Our first speaker Laura Kuri, spoke on bioregionalism. Bioregionalism incorporates three aspects which include trying to create a sustainable culture, organizing against globalization and educating as many people as possible to take action within their region. One exercise in particular that we did forced us to think about the immediate environment that we live in. On a piece of paper we were told to draw our home and within it list native plants and animals, the direction the wind blows, the type of soil that exists, the sources of water in the area and the path of water drainage. While many of these aspects may seem like “no brainers”, it was evident that none of us actually know our environments as well as we thought we did. While we appreciate and recognize that our physical environment is essential, this exercise showed the importance and relevance of knowing concrete facts about our immediate surroundings.

Our second speaker, Juan Manuel Zaragoza led us on an ecological tour of our very own neighborhood, San Anton. We first visited a gorgeous waterfall that at first glance is breathtaking, though unfortunately contains 17,000 kinds of bacteria for every 100 meters of water. As part of a project to preserve this waterfall and conduct education on wastewater, dry toilets have been installed. Not only do these dry toilets produce zero waste, but the feces are actually recycled to be used as fertilizer for soil.

Next we visited a local secondary school. Within the month, a bio-filter was installed on the school grounds in order to safely and cleanly dispose of the waste water that is produced every day from the school. The typical cost for a project like this is 1.5-2 million pesos. Because of the growing interest in these bio-filters, leaders from other facilities and schools are currently meeting in hopes of replicating this same project in their own communities
Lastly, we visited a community that has recently set up a recycling center in their neighborhood in order to decrease the amount of waste in their river. Jovita, one of the leaders in this recycling project, showed us the large bins that have been set around the area for separation and the makeshift recycling center for further separation. This project, primarily started and followed through by women, is successfully underway. As we toured, the local government official of the neighborhood, called an ayudante, joined us to listen in. As Juan Manuel explained to us, most people don’t trust the government as a whole, though more trust is placed in this local official, as their job is to listen to the concerns of their constituents on a local level.

There was a common theme that linked both Laura’s and Juan’s talks and this included the importance of participating in environmental awareness and change on a local level. This begins with simply being aware of the physical environment around us. For instance, this means knowing basic facts about our natural habitat around us as well as knowing where our waste water and trash go. Once we are familiar with these aspects, we are able to participate in the preservation of our environment on the local level with steps for change within our own neighborhoods.