‘This was a beautiful place – now look at it': The river swallowed by plastic

Telegraph

a day ago

When the rainy season comes, Madeline Vasquez knows the roar of white water through the Rio Las Vacas will bring with it a fresh deluge of plastic.
Stood precariously on rocks sheathed in sodden plastic sheeting and food packaging, she gazes down at hundreds of swirling soft drink bottles caught in an eddy.
Now 19 years old, Madeline was a baby when the people in her village began buying products in disposable plastic packaging – a life-changing innovation that they, like everyone else in the world beforehand, quickly got used to.
The storage containers which they had always used were put away. Plastic in apparently infinite supply could just be discarded, directly into the river in which Madeline's family had always fished.
Today, the chance of fish surviving in the Las Vacas seems unlikely. The river, into which much of the teeming population of Guatemala City hurls its refuse, is suffocated by plastic.
In just one generation, plastic has swallowed up a whole river ecosystem. As I talk to Madeline, an unrelenting tide of household detritus surges in brown water frothing beneath the creaking bridge on which we speak.
The Las Vacas is the most plastic-polluted river in the world. A tributary of the much broader Motagua, it is said to account for 2 per cent of the global total of river-derived plastic waste that enters the oceans.
At current levels, 20,000 tonnes of plastic flows through the Rio Motagua into the Caribbean Sea every year. When it gets really bad, the pollution can be seen on satellite images.
Madeline, coming home from her job at a nearby pharmacy, holds her hands up despairingly.
'What can I do?' she exclaims. 'It's not just us. People in the city throw their plastic into the valley, and it ends up clogging the river where I live.
'The river is so contaminated. It is just disgusting to look at. I never put my feet in it because I'm so worried about slipping on the plastic or picking up an infection from all of the dirt.
'My family can remember what it was like before. This had always been a beautiful place – now look at it.'
The contrast between the verdant peaks towering above the Las Vacas ravine and the tidal wave of discarded plastic garbage in the river is jarring, encapsulating an overwhelming manmade crisis.
Plastic waste worldwide has grown more than seven-fold since 1985, and more than doubled since 2000. By 2050, it is predicted to double again from current levels of nearly 400 million tonnes per year.
Without urgent action, which campaigners hope will come at a UN conference in Geneva next month, the degradation of domestic products into microplastics which devastate marine wildlife will inevitably worsen.
Although OECD figures released in 2022 estimated that 69 per cent of plastic waste is disposed of in landfill or incinerated, a significant proportion is tossed in rivers in countries like Guatemala.
In a paper published in Science Advances four years ago, researchers calculated that just 1,000 rivers are accountable for 80 per cent of global annual riverine plastic emissions into the sea.
Small urban rivers such as the Las Vacas, bordered by many informal dump sites in Guatemala City's outer slums, are the most polluting.
Evidence of habitual fly-tipping quickly becomes apparent. In this part of Guatemala, as in so many plastic-choked cities around the world, it is as normal as chucking a bin bag into a driveway wheelie bin.
From a tin-roofed lean-to wedged against the underside of a cliff on the other side of the road, a woman and two boys emerge.
They carry wicker baskets and crates brimming with plastic trash. It is as though they've cleared out the loft.
But rather than taking this assortment of unwanted clutter to the tip, they instead cross the road and enter a narrow path behind a religious shrine which descends steeply into the chasm.
No one on the roadside bats an eyelid. This is an everyday occurrence. I follow them down the snaking gully to where they put down the crates.
Around us, lush, bottle-green foliage that coats the sheer grey cliffs of the gorge makes for a breathtaking backdrop.
This would be an ideal place for a picnic, I think. Today it is a dump site for a random assortment of household garbage.
With a heave of her arms, Rosa, 36, jettisons her plastic load; the boys – her sons Enriquez, 11, and Victor, nine – follow suit. I ask her why.
'This is what we have always done,' she replies. 'Most of this stuff is ours, but we've gathered a few things from our neighbours as well. Throwing it into the river valley is the easiest thing. It's gone. We don't have to think about it.'
With that Rosa marches back. Her sons follow behind, grinning and unperturbed at having despoiled what would otherwise be a remarkable beauty spot.
Later, I see a woman walk out to a muddy embankment which drops down to the river. The slope is completely covered with waste, mostly plastic.
She hurls the contents of an oil drum down the incline and then turns back having completed the chore. Plastic scraps tumble down towards the churning white water.
In the nearby village of San Antonio Las Flores, 45-year-old Fidel Gonzalez upturns a wheelbarrow full of plastic into the Las Vacas.
'All of my neighbours give me their plastic,' Fidel says. 'I'm unemployed so I'm happy to do this for them. No one minds.'
Madeline, in contrast, insists she and her five younger brothers dispose of their rubbish at a dump site. But, she claims, the gesture is pointless. It will just be taken from there and lobbed into the river.
The pitiful condition of the Las Vacas has made it one of the first targets for the plastic pollution organisation Ocean Cleanup.
Dutch entrepreneur Boyan Slat dreamed up Ocean Cleanup when he was just a teenager after scuba-diving in plastic-saturated waters while on holiday in Greece.
In the 15 years since its creation, the organisation has taken a lead in eliminating plastic waste from the seas, with much of its attention focused on worst-offending rivers like the Las Vacas.
Its ultimate ambition is to go out of business by 2040 by removing 90 per cent of floating ocean plastic.
When Ocean Cleanup started work at the Las Vacas three years ago, they built a metal fence with wire mesh to absorb the debris just downstream from Madeline's village. But the sheer volume of rubbish prevented water flowing through, so the fence gave way.
The current 'Interceptor Barricade' consists of around 20 heavy-duty floating plastic booms with netting beneath chained to concrete foundations on the riverbank.
A back-up barricade further down is supposed to capture any plastic that evades the main barrier.
During my visit, an avalanche of plastic mess is washed up behind the interceptor following several nights of torrential rain.
I become transfixed by the passage of detergent bottles, pens, footballs, syringes, children's toys, insulation foam, polythene sheeting, jerrycans, sandals and even whole car bumpers.
Everything human beings have created with plastic ends up here. The experience is strangely hypnotic.
I am reminded of a fairground penny drop, anticipating the moment when the weight becomes too much and bursts through.
Thankfully that never happens. The barrage has been cleverly designed.
The serene majesty of the scenery on the bank behind is offset by the sight of vultures devouring the rotting corpse of a dead dog which has become snagged up in the plastic morass.
In a roadside clearing behind the interceptor are several towering mounds of waste, one of which is what was scooped by diggers from the build-up the day before our arrival.
Ocean Cleanup's operations manager at the Las Vacas site Guillermo Sosa tells me 33 truckloads of waste were offloaded in just a few hours, most of which was plastic, jumbled in with wool, metal, glass and other materials.
The work here never stops, particularly during the rainy season when the lingering litter on the verges of the river is flushed down.
A handful of workers remove plastic which can be recycled from the festering mess of unwanted junk.
In the last two years, they have scooped up around three million kilogrammes of plastic from the interceptor, a phenomenal quantity of mostly superfluous plastic.
'Plastic pollution is a problem which affects all citizens here in Guatemala,' says Sosa. 'We have the solution for cleaning the river, but people need to have the willingness to stop plastic getting in there in the first place. There is a cultural problem.
'People just throw their trash in the river and expect someone else to change things. They are not really bothered.'
One factor said to aggravate proper rubbish collections in this region north of Guatemala City is that villages adjoining the Las Vacas are dominated by gangs.
Extortion against waste collection companies is allegedly widespread, so bin lorries no longer stop in many communities.
Illegal sand-dredging from the riverbed is another issue plaguing the formerly tranquil mountainous region. Indigenous inhabitants sit behind banners at a protest stall by the roadside, but their quiet voices of consternation are drowned out by passing lorries.
Edwin Castellanos, Guatemala's Vice Minister of Natural Resources and Climate Change, insists his government is striving to change the habits of people who throw garbage into the river.
'The population is not well educated at all in terms of waste management,' Castellanos concedes. 'So, for example, it's very common for many communities to see a ravine and think, 'Well, that's the proper place to dispose my garbage, because it disappears'.
'The last census showed that about half of the population burn the garbage near their homes too and they do that because they have no other option. It will be a challenge to really reach out to everybody and educate them on the best way to manage the garbage.'
At a hydroelectric dam downstream from the interceptor, manager Jonatan Caceres points out large quantities of plastic trash which slipped through, but indicates this is far better than it was a few years ago.
'We have been dealing with trash here since 2005,' he says. 'When the amount of plastic building up gets really bad it creates mechanical problems.'
For some, the accumulation of trash behind the interceptor has become a vital source of income. Among the opportunist scavengers who depend on the congested river are children.
These waste pickers sift through the rotting soup of garbage for objects which might be sold on to scrap dealers.
Tiny Maria, nine, and her brother Luis, 12, spend the whole morning filling sacks with discarded metal to trade with a man who waits on the shingle beach.
Luis is bent-double as he scales the mound of plastic trash on the riverbank with a yoga ball-sized lump of crushed metal which he carries on his back. Maria follows behind carrying something even more cumbersome.
Once the sacks are weighed and emptied, Maria and Luis return to their task. Both should be at school.
Accompanied by their aunt, Rosemary, 20, they collectively receive about £2 for four hours' backbreaking labour in the sweltering heat.
'It would be a shame if they cleaned the river completely,' admits Rosemary contrarily, 'because then there would not be any rubbish to sell. During the rainy season we depend on the metal.'
It takes around two weeks for Guatemala City's plastic to flow down the Motagua to the river mouth in the Caribbean.
There, just outside the stilt-house village of El Quezalito, a much longer barrier designed to block plastic waste which has entered the river system further downstream is in position.
One resident tells me the plastic tide could sometimes reach the roof of her single-storey home during the rainy season. She would stand in crocodile-infested waters pushing refuse away by hand. Now the village's dusty thoroughfares are clean.
But the problem of removing the tonnes of legacy plastic which had already scarred miles of otherwise pristine sands either side of the estuary remains.
We take a fishing boat through choppy waves to a stretch of beach where men are methodically clearing away plastic.
Even though they have been at the task for weeks, unsightly detritus still dominates the shoreline. The sand is infested with it. This is the resting place of much of the rubbish which gets chucked in somewhere along the 302-mile course of the Motagua.
Clearing it away is a Herculean effort in debilitating, humid heat.
Cesar Dubon, a former fisherman, says concentration of plastic affected his catch so badly that he stopped taking his boat out.
Plastic was smeared along a 34-mile stretch of coastline, over the border into Honduras. Turtles, crabs and fish would die after getting snagged up.
'I first came here when we were resettled after Hurricane Mitch destroyed our homes in 1998,' recalls Cesar, 54. 'Back then there wasn't that much plastic. It only got really bad over the last 20 years.
'This beach was just plastic; you could hardly see the sand. It was up to your knees. Nearly all of that had emerged from the river.
'Now we have managed to completely clean a stretch of beach on the other side of the river. We can actually go there with our families. Last year was the first time my children had been able to see it properly.'
Cesar and his crew pile their sacks of unsorted plastic onto another wooden boat. One of them, 23-year-old José Ramirez, wears a motorcycle helmet he has just found among the leftovers.
At a depot in El Quezalito, plastic that can be recycled is bagged up and trucked over the border into Honduras.
There, at the sprawling Terra Polyester factory in the industrial city of Choloma, plastic from across Central America is cleaned and sorted on immense conveyer belts. All potential contaminants are removed by hand.
The plant, which employs 400 people, transforms most of the retrieved hard plastic bottles into flakes and long filaments of polyester fibre to be used for household clothing, bedding, and cleaning materials.
Inside the sweaty warehouse, a future in which plastic does not inevitably finish in the ocean seems tangible.
Despite this successful transformation, however, Boyan Slat is fully realistic about the scale of the task facing his organisation as it ramps up operations around the world.
Ocean Cleanup's short-term aim is to eliminate a third of all plastic flowing from the world's rivers before the end of the decade, focusing on 30 cities.
Data acquired from weighing plastic taken out of rivers where it already operates, including the Las Vacas, suggests it currently extricates less than 3 per cent.
'The reason why we are in rivers is to stop more plastic from going into the oceans,' explains Slat. 'The fact that the rivers also benefit from it is essentially a positive side effect.
'We chose to expand the scope from oceans because to truly solve this problem we need to deal not only with the legacy pollution that's already out there but also with the inflow. The rivers are the arteries that carry the plastic to sea. Our data showed that rivers are the point of highest leverage.'
'River interception is not the ultimate solution,' Slat continues. 'Long term, of course, countries need to get their act together in terms of waste management and perhaps managing the consumption of plastic as well, but that's going to take decades.
'The way we position interceptors is really as a short-term fix. We hope that in, say, 30, 40, 50 years from now, those interceptors can be taken out of the river. Hopefully one day all these cities will be as pristine as Singapore or Tokyo. We want to help ourselves out of business.'
The sticking point at the Geneva talks is expected to be around the production of plastics and specific chemicals used in manufacturing. Boyan Slat believes a compromise deal is most likely.
Negotiations broke down at the previous round in South Korea last year because of objections from oil-producing countries with a vested interest in plastics production.
Those involved diverge over the prospect of a breakthrough.
For Castellanos, real progress requires the plastic production line to be slowed down, even if it is not completely switched off.
'When we talk to industry and private sector, they indicate that plastic is a necessity,' he adds. 'In many aspects and in many, in many ways, it is true. But the problem is that we have abused the use of plastic.'
Rob Opsomer from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation is advocating a model in which businesses that put plastic into the market pay a fee for the collection and recycling.
'When it comes to plastics, our vision is a circular economy where we eliminate all the plastics we don't need,' he explains. 'There are many we can eliminate which we don't need. We should innovate so all the ones we do need are kept in the economy and out of the environment.
'At the UN Oceans conference, 97 countries came together and reaffirmed their commitment. Then there is a group that looks at it as a waste management issue, saying we should be able to produce as much as we want if we just invest more in systems to collect it and manage it. We would very much argue that the only way to actually tackle the issue at scale is a comprehensive lifecycle approach.'
Perhaps the talks would be better situated on a bridge over the Las Vacas than in a swept and tidied conference hall in ultra-clean Switzerland, the world's sixth best country for waste management according to the Environmental Performance Index.