/IPS ENVIRONMENT BULLETIN/ SPAIN: Monster Garbage Tip Comes To Lethal Life

By Tito Drago Reprint | | Print |

Tito Drago

MADRID, Oct 12 1996 (IPS) - Urban garbage ‘lives’ — it moves, contaminates and kills. A trash-slide at a million tonne waste dump in Spain has already claimed one life. Yet effective action is still not being taken, despite the protests of environmentalists.

The 40 million inhabitants of Spain each generate about a kilogramme of garbage a day, 25 percent of which — some 10 million kilos a day — is dropped at unauthorised dumps. One such dump is the Bens dump outside the Galician town of O Portino, near the northern city of La Coruna.

On Sep. 10, the tip of this 22 year old trash mountain — the height of a 14 storey building — sheared off.

Some 100,000 tonnes of waste rolled nearly a kilometre down to the sea, burying homes and cars and killing Joaquin Serrantes, one of the dozens of poor people, including whole families, who scratched a living salvaging on the tip.

Socialist Mayor Francisco Vazquez wants the tip declared a disaster zone by the Madrid government. He warns that the restraining walls holding back the rest of the tip are cracking and if they break the poisonous semi-liquid mass at the tip’s heart will spill into the sea — with possibly devastating effect on marine life that sustains the local fishing industry.

The decomposing heart of the mountain is now exposed to the air, sending stinking gases by wind through the town. Some 250 people, mostly gypsies living in shanties, have been evacuated from the area.

Vazquez says that in environmental terms it could be Spain’s worst ever environmental disaster, ten times worse than the 1993 Aegean Sea oil tanker disaster, which spilled 80,000 tonnes of crude oil into the seas at the foot of La Coruna’s 2nd-century Tower of Hercules Roman lighthouse.

But Spanish environment minister Isabel Tocino rejected his call. “This is not a natural disaster.” she told Spanish media. “It is something that could have been seen coming.” A 4.7 million dollar European Union grant to secure the dump was in preparation before the killer slide and she has promised to get it speeded up.

In the meantime, about 50 excavating machines and trucks are working to shift the mountain and barriers — similar to those used to contain the ‘black tide’ left by the 1993 oil spill — are in place. They have already been surpassed.

Scientists say that these vast piles of accumulated garbage have ‘lives’ of their own that are almost impossible to control. Soaked by rain, the decomposing garbage generates gases such as methane that can explode. Also, when fermentation occurs without oxygen, the residue becomes highly toxic for terrestrial and aquatic microflora and microfauna.

The unstable condition of the vast piles of trash, destabilised by gas pockets, changes in temperature, water build up and the people tramping over its surface, mean that it can move dramatically in seconds.

A resident of O Portino told Spanish TV that the garbage dump was always a ‘volcano’ in danger of erupting. “When there aren’t fumes and small explosions of methane gas, residual waters flows into the ocean.”

Environmental NGOs like the Association for the Ecological Defence of Galicia (ADEGA) say the dump was consistently mismanaged and have submitted a writ to a local court which claims that the dump did not have vents that would allow gas produced by fermentation to escape. The dump, says the group, also needed channels to collect highly toxic liquids, thick with toxic lead, zinc and mercury, that have built up inside its heart.

The group cites a University of Santiago de Compostela study published in 1986 that warned that contaminated rainwater was leaching underground, endangering the water supplies to the 500,000 people living in and around la Coruna.

Some put their hopes in a giant 100 million dollar EU programme to seal off all the dangerous garbage dumps across Spain. As for the waste left behind, engineers and environmentalists are arguing over the choice between incineration and other methods of disposal.

But all but the most expensive incinerators only redistribute the dirt as soot, together with poisons like cancer-causing dioxins.

All Europe and further afield is looking for an answer. Western Europe’s cities generated about 140 million tons of garbage in 1994 and an EU survey estimated that each person in Europe now produces, every day, the statistical equivalent of 250 litres of waste water, a kilogramme of household waste and 200 grams of toxic waste.

Beirut has added an area the size of a dozen city blocks to its coastline, built on two decades of beach trash. The islands of waste in Tokyo Bay, holding the more than 22,000 tonnes of garbage generated by the Japanese capital each day, are posing navigational hazards to shipping and killing fish.

In Spain however there may be a simple option. Selection and separation of trash — removing and recycling the waste that could feed gas and toxin build up — is the best preventative measure waste dump managers can take to prevent later problems.

So why not call in the gypsies who have been working the tips for years? It is a technique pioneered in Cairo, where the 30,000 strong Zabbaleen (‘garbage collectors’ in Arabic) community, the marginalised members of the country’s Christian Coptic minority, have sorted and recycled trash since the 1940s.

Cairo’s 16 million inhabitants produce about 6,000 tonnes of waste a day and the Zabbaleen collect and sorts half of it. In comparison London, with half Cairo’s population, produces 6,600 tons a day and recycles three percent. The Zabbaleen won a U.N. Global 500 award for environmental achievement in 1995.

Alfonso del Val of the Madrid Centre for Research for Peace and author of The Book Of Recycling, says the gypsies who live in the seven shanty settlements of Madrid recovered more garbage than the entire public sanitation system in 1995. Del Val says that organic urban garbage could also bring benefits if it is recycled and used, for example, for fertiliser.