!Viva reciclaje! Mexico City is moving toward a residential recycling culture through education and privatization.

For American urbanites, municipal recycling efforts, complete with colored trash bins and mandatory separation of materials, have become run of the mill.

Not so in Mexico City, where residents have to listen for the bell of a garbage truck before they dash down flights of stairs, out the door and down to the street corner where an aging truck and its crew await.

With trash collection at this early stage, formalized recycling to reduce the country's approximately 90,000 tons of waste produced per day--12,000 tons of which come from Mexico City alone--seems a far-off dream.

LATIN AMERICAN CONTEXT

Currently, recycling is part of the city's informal economy, carried out by a combination of garbage collectors who separate and sell the goods for their own profit, scavengers who sell materials they find in landfills, nonprofit organizations and companies in the recycling business.

Citywide compliance with recycling laws is lagging, but some municipalities are educating their young people about the environment and instituting a recycling structure.

"The issue is present on political tables; it's already a problem that municipal governments are listening to," says National Environmental Ministry official Sandra Herrera.

Other Latin American countries are well ahead of Mexico's recycling programs, but the nation has considerable incentives. Those incentives for stronger Mexican environmental policies include the NAFTA treaty, its membership in the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and its trade relationships with the U.S. and Europe, according to a 2006 report by Maryland-based Raymond Communications.

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Despite these incentives, Mexico recycles only about 6 percent of its solid waste, compared to 10 percent in Colombia and approximately 15 percent in Peru, but it has the potential to fairly easily recycle about one-third, the report says.

CAPITAL IDEAS

In Mexico City, the nation's capital and one of the world's biggest population centers, the need for effective waste management is clear. Its only landfill, Bordo Poniente, which has an operating budget of approximately $150 million per year, is likely to be closed in the next year and is now at risk of fracturing its base and leaking contaminants into the soil, according to local news reports. Mexico City has three separation plants, but they are controlled by powerful unions and only yield about 6 percent of the city's total trash as recyclable material.

Separation of trash has been mandatory for residences and businesses in Mexico City since October 2004, but the problem is in how to implement the law when many neighborhoods don't have compartmentalized trucks.

According to Herrera, the city's leftist government would never privatize trash collection, which could lead to better infrastructure. The city of Merida, in the Yucatan, successfully privatized recycling in 2005, saving the city 20,000 pesos (approximately USD $1,813) per month. "It looks like a very little, but it becomes significant over time," she says.

NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH

The Miguel Hidalgo Delegation, one of 16 sections of Mexico City, has taken a novel approach--it took the 2004 solid waste law seriously and began to invest in recycling to reduce trash and keep the area clean.

Neighborhood officials are modernizing trucks and educating citizens about trash separation, while leaving potential profits in the hands of collection crews. The delegation now separates its 700 tons of waste per day into about 50 tons of organic material for compost and 650 tons of inorganic material, which is sent to plants for further sorting and recycling.

"We've got to change the culture and make people aware of the importance of separating [recyclables] and taking care of the environment," says Delegate Gabriela Cuevas, political leader of Miguel Hidalgo, who is determined to make it the city's most environmentally conscious delegation.

Since Mexico City made trash separation mandatory by law three years ago, Miguel Hidalgo may well be the only delegation that has taken steps to institutionalize recycling. The delegation has purchased 11 trucks with space for organic and inorganic material, and its education campaigns in schools, businesses and public places like markets have made citizens more compliant in separating their trash.

"I think that everyday people are more involved in caring for the environment, especially children and adolescents," says Cuevas.

The campaign hasn't yet led to a rush of businesses to cultivate a "green" image, she says, but many have shown an interest in cooperating.

The initiative exists "for environmental reasons, because we don't have the possibility of earning money from recycling," Cuevas says.

They have agreed with trash collectors that any earnings from the sale of recyclables will supplement their wages, which are now about $180 per month. But these trucks use fewer personnel, which means contracted employees who used to hire extra non-city workers to help them no longer need the extra staff.

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Among recycled materials in Miguel Hidalgo are Tetra-pak containers, glass, batteries and compostables.

They haven't yet organized plastics recycling, but are looking for a cooperative agreement for the material. Officials have agreements with the Junior League, a volunteer group, to pick up milk and juice cartons for recycling, and a company has been contracted to collect cooking oil so that vendors don't dump it into street drains.

INDUSTRY INCENTIVES

One important push for change is coming from the industrial sector.

An example of private initiative is ECOCE (Ecologia y Compromiso Empresatial), an enterprise paid for by bottlers and beverage producers that has collected almost 8 billion plastic bottles since it started up in 2004.

Now it picks up 23 percent of Mexico's PET bottles, according to Herrera. Of these, only 30 percent are consumed by manufacturers in Mexico, while the rest are sent to Asia.

"The big challenge now is finding more companies in Mexico that would buy collected PET to make textiles or to make plastic sheets or furniture for schools, etc.," Herrera says.

In the last two-to-three years, more foreign buyers have become interested in Mexican recyclables from the United States, Europe and Asian countries like China, Korea, Singapore and Japan. They have shown interest in a variety of products, among them ferrous and nonferrous metals, recovered fiber like cardboard and paper, electronic scrap and plastic.

"They are buying strongly here in Mexico now, says Elias Vanegas, director of the Instituto Nacional de Recicladores (INARE). "The red dragon has a greater presence in the whole world," he says of China.

Prices have gone up with rising demand, but Vanegas says some buyers are putting price caps on the materials, particularly iron.

"They are buying below the international market," he says, regarding a price drop in mid-July. "These guys fill their inventories and when they're full, they say, 'We don't want to buy now.'"

INARE is in favor of municipal recycling, viewing it as a source of raw material and a way to prevent more disposal of reusable materials. It's a business, of course, but part of the motivation to recycle in Mexico is ecological.

"What we want is to take care of the environment and to be conscious of the use of natural resources in this country," Vanegas comments.

The pro-recycling nonprofit organization APREPET also represents the plastic industry. The companies are out to improve their businesses, but this doesn't put them at odds with the environment, they say. On the contrary, recycling plastic means less spent on original materials and a more economical product, the group contends.

In spite of the current efforts to recycle more material in Mexico, a long road still lies ahead. Santiago Garcia, general manager of APREPET, says fewer than 20 percent of families in Mexico City currently separate their recyclables from their trash, and the rest has to be done by hand after pickup, which is dangerous and inefficient.

"One hundred percent of trash should pass through a selection plant," Garcia says. "Because there is no longer enough space to throw it away."

The author is a freelance journalist based in Mexico City. She can be contacted through her Web site at www.kimberlynoelchase.com.