Every morning, trucks collect potato and avocado skins, orange peels and other food scraps that residents of Santiago’s poorest neighborhood leave hanging in bags on their front doors or in tree branches or place in special bins.
For nearly two decades, the residents of La Pintana have been pioneers of recycling in Chile — South America’s largest garbage generator.
Under a project started in 2005, the commune of 190,000 people enthusiastically gather their plant-based food waste, which is then turned into compost to help green their community.
Photo: AFP
In La Pintana, where 15 percent of people live in poverty, 50 percent of the community’s organic waste is collected for recycling — a figure that puts to shame the 0.8 percent achieved by Chile as a whole, according to the Chilean Ministry for the Environment.
“They do a lot with it [the waste] — they produce compost and it is used for the community itself, for the squares and gardens,” La Pintana resident Jose Vera said as he left two large cardboard boxes filled with scraps on the sidewalk, proud of his contribution.
“It is also a saving [for the municipality] because they no longer have to buy” fertilizer or pay landfill fees, he said.
Chile generates 1.13kg of waste per person per day — the highest output in South America, according to the World Bank.
In terms of recycling, it is far from achieving even Latin America’s low average of 4 percent of solid municipal waste processed, but La Pintana, one of the first neighborhoods of Chile’s deeply socially unequal capital to adopt such a project, now collects about 20 tonnes of organic waste every day.
It is delivered to a local plant that turns the scraps into natural fertilizer for the town’s own municipal nursery, and others.
The municipality estimates to be saving about US$100,000 per year — money that can go to other community projects.
“There has been a change in people,” since the project started, Vera said. “They are now concerned about recycling and no longer put the vegetables with the garbage.”
La Pintana’s nursery, built on what used to be an unsightly landfill, yields about 100,000 plants of 400 different species every year.
They are planted back in La Pintana, one of the areas of Santiago with the fewest green spaces per inhabitant.
The nursery uses about 1 tonne of humus — a dark organic matter created when plant material decomposes — every year, project member Cintia Ortiz said.
All of it is obtained from La Pintana’s plant waste.
“This humus, the benefit it gives us, is that it is organic ... thanks to the community and the workers,” Ortiz said.
In addition, “as we can keep the plants well-nourished, we do not have to use chemicals,” Ortiz added.
Planting flowers outside a sports center, municipal worker Jeanette Gonzalez said that the project “brings us ... joy. The town is improving.”
“When we took over [in 2016] ... it was a town where every 200 meters there was a landfill,” La Pintana Mayor Claudia Pizarro said of the trailblazing project, which has received several international awards.
“It is a virtuous circle — people see that where there used to be a landfill there is now greenery and everything is flourishing, and they stop throwing garbage there,” she said.
There have also been spillover benefits — more than half of the municipal nursery’s 15 staff are former inmates doing community work in lieu of serving prison time.
Chilean Minister for the Environment Maisa Rojas has proposed a bill to reproduce the project in the rest of the nation.
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