It’s been 11 years since an environmental regulation (NAE-SEMADES-007/2008) was introduced mandating that municipalities in Jalisco come up with effective policies for separating trash.
In that time, none of the Guadalajara metropolitan area’s five major municipalities have fully complied with the order. As the rest of the world cottons on to modern waste management techniques and strategies, Guadalajara is mired in the Middle Ages, with most of its municipalities (Tlajomulco an exception) daily mixing 5,000 tons of organic and non-organic trash in their trucks, relying on pepinadores (scavengers) at insalubrious landfills to sort through mountains of garbage for recyclable, saleable items.
This week, the state government decided to stamp its footprint on the issue, announcing a “new model” for waste-management in the metro area, which eventually will see traditional garbage dumps replaced with two advanced waste processing centers, to be known in Spanish as “centros integrales de economía circular.”
Governor Enrique Alfaro said the centers will be located at the existing Picachos landfill in Zapopan and at a site to be determined in the south of the city.
At the same time, Alfaro announced that the Laureles landfill in Tonala, which receives garbage from four municipalities, will close. The dump has been a constant focus of criticism for its environmental mismanagement. Calls for its closure have been ongoing since April when a section of the landfill caught fire, prompting an air contamination alert. A request by the concession holders, Caabsa Eagle, to expand the landfill was denied earlier this month. The firm has now been given two years to terminate operations at the dump, and must come up with a technical plan to achieve this satisfactorily within two months.
Under the new model, Alfaro said all metro-area households will be obliged to separate trash into recyclable and non-recyclable material for curbside collection on different days of the week.
Over the past decade, both Guadalajara and Zapopan city halls have made half-hearted attempts to introduce designated pick-up days. None have succeeded because there is no infrastructure to sort the material once it arrives at its destination and most of the trash just gets thrown into a landfill.
Alfaro said the new plan includes the setting up of several “transfer centers” to receive and sort some of trash before it is taken to the two main waste-management centers.
The governor said a long-term goal of the plan is to generate energy from the municipal waste, a technology that is becoming more and more popular worldwide.
It is unclear how long it will take to set up the new waste-management centers. Equipping them and making them operational will be an expensive and complicated task and well beyond the budgets of municipalities.
Back in June, Zapopan Mayor Pablo Lemus said his municipality could not afford to install any kind of trash separation model, or rehabilitate the Picachos landfill to accommodate new technologies. And a plan that he announced last year to introduce designated pick-up days for trash in Zapopan, slated for introduction early in 2019, has been put on hold indefinitely, the mayor said.