But garbage continued to pile up until 2012, when the city finally shut it down. In 1996, the city began implementing measures to limit the levels of pollution in the landfill, starting with treating some of the leachate, the toxic byproduct of mountains of rotting trash. Between the landfill’s inauguration in 19, some 80 million tons of garbage were dumped in the area, polluting the bay and surrounding rivers with trash and runoff. The former landfill is located right by the 148 square miles (383 square kilometers) Guanabara Bay. Gouveia, who has worked with Comlurb for 38 years, witnessed the Gramacho landfill recovery project’s timid first steps in the late 1990s. If we don’t pollute nature, it heals itself.” “This is an environmental lesson that we must learn from: nature is remarkable. The only thing missing is cattle,” jokes Elias Gouveia, an engineer with Comlurb, the city’s garbage collection agency that is shepherding the plantation project.
“If we didn’t say this used to be a landfill, people would think it’s a farm. Now, a decade after Rio de Janeiro shut it down and redoubled efforts to recover the surrounding expanse of highly polluted swamp, crabs, snails, fish and birds are once again populating the mangrove forest.
RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) - It was once Latin America’s largest landfill.
0 kommentar(er)
