Chile Forum

It is bewildering that a city as modern (well, in some parts) as Santiago does not have a municipal recycling program. In all fairness, I recently returned from Buenos Aires, and there is nothing in place there, either. Is there any attempt to get one started? I was recently chatting with a Chilean who just returned from a post-doc year in California. Her biggest complaint was that she had to sort her trash in CA. The use of plastic bags here is out of control, too. My local LIDER won´t sell me one lemon unless it is in a plastic bag!!!

i think the biggest problems with supermarkets here in Chile is that each checkout isnt fitted with a scale and therefore cannot weigh loose fruit and veg.. so everything need to be bagged, weighed and sealed... otherwise people could weigh one lemon then put a kilo or more in a bag and pay for the weight of one..thats my take on it.. i hate using bags but i guess until a lider or santa isabel install scales at the checkout then plastic bags will be used for individual items.. recycling here is about 5- 10 years away still..

No infrastructure, i.e. recycling plants. Building them would require forward thinking. planning for the future, interest in public works for the sake of the public good rather than graft.

I think littering is a seen as a "right" or a macho thing in Latin America. There would have to be a long 10 to 20 year anti-littering education campaign aimed at the children, forget the adults. Then in a generation progress could be made.

Putting a refund on plastic containers would go a long way to cleaning up the environment, I got tired of the burning plastic smell every night in Arica. They did it at night... like that makes it OK or something.

Real environmental political perspectives, especially in the urban areas of Chile is still years away. Much of the Chilean society is still very much on the environmental destruction = development mentality, and there is a real ingrained fear/paranoia/what ever against Chile being seen as a "developing" country. Proof of that Chile is not for many means plastic, concrete, clear cutting, damming, polluting, and so on. Companies in Chile are capitalizing on that development phobia for political support to pollute. Jobs and development = the right to pollute and destroy. Sited here the Salmon industry, the logging industry, the mining industry, and our international super star the dams in the Patagonia.

That is the bad news. The good news is that Chile is only 15 million people, with all this land. If Chile was say the population equal to Argentina or worse Brazil, and had a lot less resources, then there might be no hope on the environmental front. Chile's population growth will likely not take off sufficiently fast to fully devastate the environment, before they are able to get it under control and peoples attitudes change. They are changing, but slowly. The environmental awareness that does exist is still on a very crude level, and those are first baby steps towards more complex environmental philosophies.

Being aware that say throwing your plastic bags in to the forest is bad, leads hopefully to the next generation at least thinking about plastic bags being simply bad period. Most of the industrialized world has yet to come to any sort of political conclusion against them, knocking Chile for not having done it yet is a bit of stretch. Recycling in most of the industrialized world is still very much a political show, even when it is mandatory. Millions of tons of "recycled" materials sit in warehouses or end up back in dumps after the "good" environmental political shows that mandate cities do it.

What ticks me off about Chile is that Chile has the opportunity, money, educated population to do environmentalism correctly. If they really engaged in it on a political and social level full force (hell, even half ass), Chile would be seen by the rest of the world as definitely not a developing country. Not the way the rest of Latin America is seen. It would be a near impossibility with the education, population, social problems, economic issues for any other country in Latin America to do it the way Chile is in a position to do it. They are in position to show up places like Iceland or most of the European countries programs.

Chilean companies will be the key. Once they start realizing that there is big money in environmentally geared projects, the political tails winds will be there. There is currently a fairly good stream of foreign companies starting to come in to Chile for all kinds of environmentally orientated projects.

What ticks me off about Chile is that Chile has the opportunity, money, educated population to do environmentalism correctly. If they really engaged in it on a political and social level full force (hell, even half ass), Chile would be seen by the rest of the world as definitely not a developing country. Not the way the rest of Latin America is seen. It would be a near impossibility with the education, population, social problems, economic issues for any other country in Latin America to do it the way Chile is in a position to do it. They are in position to show up places like Iceland or most of the European countries programs.

Ditto on that one. I think this is why I am totally baffled on the lack of awareness of these issues- Chile has the resources and the intellect. And since a major part of Chile´s economy is agribusiness, you would think people at the top would be a bit concerned with global warming.

[quote="Chuck J 3.0"]There would have to be a long 10 to 20 year anti-littering education campaign aimed at the children, forget the adults.[/quote]

isn't one of the most basic rules of business supply & demand. Youth always has the energy, the older you get the more you get comfortable and change is slower. If the government pushed a change in education for recycling and children/youths started to push for recycling then you could see some change. The part I always come back to is the whole ethical wage debate and how most Chileans are living near/at/in poverty. Always seems hard to tell people they should do this and that which will give them more work when they have more important problems in their life.

So far as recycling goes, here in Valparaiso , there are very large containers in the shape of a bell, painted in dark green, Labeled CODEFF, Corporación de Defensa a la Flora y Fauna ( (Corporation for the Defense of Flora and Fauna) with a logo depicting a PUDU.
It is used to collect glass bottles, with somehow relative exit , still,streets are littered with broken bottles of beer ,everywhere, specially on the stairs .

Interesting site in Spanish, that list the initiatives about recycling in Chile...

http://www.yoreciclo.cl/index.htm


Collecting "bell"

I found a specially designated disposal container for batteries in Santo Domingo!

When you enter Santo Domingo, across from the supermarket are recycle bins and one is designated for batteries.

Anyone that plans to swing this way, please save your dead batteries and dispose of them properly.

eeuunikkeiexpat wrote:I found a specially designated disposal container for batteries in Santo Domingo!

When you enter Santo Domingo, across from the supermarket are recycle bins and one is designated for batteries.

Anyone that plans to swing this way, please save your dead batteries and dispose of them properly.

Chilectra in Plaza Egaña here in Santiago has that too.

There may not be a lot of official recycling programs, but where I live, at least, you always see the cartoneros taking anything that is recyclable - cardboard, bottles, cans, out of the garbage bins to take and recycle.

I was wondering if the markets still sell aqua mineral in deposit type bottles (?)
When I first visited in the late 80s it was easy to buy this water and fill your own container in the store to avoid paying the deposit. There were wooden racks for the bottles all over the place....used for soft drinks too

When I visited again in 1991, I noticed plastic water bottles were becoming more common. I really hate those things!

Scott

I can't remember where but I read somewher that the recycling relies hevily on those people the comb through your trash the night before garbare pick up. Some products (cardboard & bottles for sure) can be sold back to the factories that make them. There is a whole group of people that walk through the streets of Santiago at night time picking through trash looking for these things. They get seem to get enough to make it worth while.

When I was in Santiago I was talking to friends and family about openning a recycling plant. The person throwing the trash away would be none the wiser... everything would be sorted at the plant. I think that will probably be the only way to make at difference in a short period of time. The sorted goods could be sold back to the manufactures in Chile or sold to China or something. There would probably be a fair bit of profit to be made.

Jason Roesler, AT
ISH

dsmess wrote:... When I first visited in the late 80s it was easy ...

... When I visited again in 1991, I noticed plastic water bottles were becoming more common. I really hate those things!..

Oh, when I first visited this planet..

But now.. people fill their head with all kinds of plastic for some reason. It probably helps to develop their brain..