The view of the Trash Pit of Atenas. It is situated in an area that is unfit to handle this activity because it was orignally an illegal dump. There are 50 official open trash pits like this in Costa Rica as well as over 200 illegal dumps.

I still smell the smoke from the open trash pit everywhere I go a day later. I am very conscious of my sinuses and how my mucus membranes must have absorbed all of the smoke from the burning plastics. Don’t we all love carcinogens! I can’t stop sneezing. When people sneeze in Costa Rica they say “salud” (health) for the first, “dinero” (wealth) for the second, and “amor” (love) for the third. My problem is that I’m sneezing a lot more than three times in a row. While I was in the middle of a fit, an intern’s boyfriend stopped by my hammock to chat.

Hordes of black vultures and these men pick through the trash looking for valubles. Metals like aluminum can help generate income. This area is managed by unrestricted burning and burying.

I complained to him of the open trash pit. He listened intently as I described the smoldering piles of trash, the people picking through it looking for valuables, all the particulate matter burning our eyes, and the stench. Then he told me that he works as a firefighter and had seen similar scenarios while in Thailand. That made me feel a little guilty for complaining. I can’t imagine what it does to the lungs and the health of the people who live off what they find in dumps. Though I haven’t seen them, I heard that there are entirely families that live in shanty towns in the major open dump in San Jose. It’s an honest way to make a living as opposed to robbery or dealing drugs. Hopefully, with modernization people won’t have to live like that anymore.

The Mack Truck dumps garbage collected from Atenas 3 times per week. According to Nolan, our Director, a person in a developed country generates 2-4 kg of trash/day. He jokes that Costa Rica is racing to catch up. Urbanites here generate a daily average of 1.1 kg of trash.

A research project for a previous semester’s group of students was to ride along on the trash trucks, tear open the garbage bags, and record their contents. They found that 35% was organic material, 32% was recyclable (paper, cardboard, glass, plastic), and 33% was actually trash. If infrastructure is put into place for the people here to compost and recycle trash generation would be reduced to a third!

Los Mangos WPP Management Sanitary Landfill is a private company that employs 150 workers. In 1994, they paid an intial startup of approximately $75,000 to clean up what had been an open trash pit that hosted a herd of hundreds of pigs. Now they charge $16 per ton of trash accepted.

After visiting the open trash pit, our class traveled to Los Mangos sanitary landfill. The engineer who gave us a tour boastfully proclaimed, “Open trash pits are the problem, and sanitary landfills are the solution.” I don’t think of sanitary landfills as the complete solution. I see recycling, composting, use of less packaging, and goods that are made to last instead of be disposable as other elements of the solution. Nobody likes to see piles of garbage and think about all the waste we generate but the truth is that we are consumers. Trash disposal is an issue. Sanitary landfills are a better option than open trash pits.

The Director Engineer demonstrates the black impermeable geomembrane and the clay/fiber geotextile that lay under a thick layer of gravel at the bottom of each trash cell. In case the black layer tears the clay/fiber layer swells up to prevent leakage.

I was impressed by the fact that the sanitary landfill had a full time staff to pick up any trash that blew away or into the mesh wind guard fence. At the end of each day all of the trash is burried under a compacted layer of dirt. Workers are not allowed to take anything they find in the trash. If they do it is considered stealing and they can be fired. I understand this is important for sanitation and worker productivity but it seems as though they should be able to take something if they want it because it’s just going to be compacted under the ground forever anyway. There are biogass collectors here and the gas is burned but it is currently not used to generate energy which is something they should definitely pursue in the future. Once this landfill has reached capacity it will be turned into a public park and be monitored for 15 years. Due to changes in consumption patterns over the past 4 years this landfill will reach capacity much sooner than expected.

Lizzie wears a hard hat, shades, and a bandana to protect herself from fumes and particulate matter. Can you find the rest of our class in this pictures?

The world and the Costa Rican population are both growing along with per capita consumption. Your average Costa Rican Jose on the street is no longer carrying his lunch to work wrapped up in biodegradable banana leaves. Now everything is individually wrapped in plastic and then put inside a plastic bag. Even at restaurants the metal cutlery is given out in little plastic bags. We are living in a throwaway world of disposable packaging!

Me, Lauren, Kate, and Rachel: Strong women who have what it takes to take on tough problems!

Now I really want to tour a landfill in The States to see what it’s like.