Brasilia's Anniversary Creates Battle Against Trash

BRASILIA, Brazil -- The 49th anniversary of Brazil’s capital city, on April 21, filled the Ministries Esplanade with cultural attractions, outdoor activities, and more than 1 million celebrants. And the daylong celebration, which lasted well into the night, turned the expansive garden surrounded by government buildings into a massive rubbish heap.
As Brazilians poured into the gardens by the hundreds of thousands, the garbage accumulated by the tons. Too few garbage cans had been scattered along the esplanade, and many food vendors selling barbecue, popcorn and drinks didn’t provide a waste bin for their customers and didn’t bother cleaning around their stalls. 

The previously lush, clean grass disappeared under mounds of discarded cans, bottles, plastic bags and all kinds of leftover food. Conscientious celebrants who looked for waste bins found they were overflowing. Many others just dropped their litter on the ground. 

One girl was seen picking cans off the ground and collecting them in a big trash bag she carried. She said a recycling company was paying her the equivalent of about $2 U.S. for each kilo of cans she turned in. The girl, who did not provide her name, said she planned to use the money to buy food. 

The city’s sanitation workers, dressed in orange uniforms and waving brooms, tried to clean all they could while the celebration was going on but they couldn’t seem to win the battle until the nighttime concerts ended and the esplanade emptied out.  

The next day, a female sanitation worker said she began cleaning at 6:30 a.m. Her shift ended at 3 p.m., when a second shift came to work until 10 p.m. “Another staff will come tomorrow to do fine cleaning,” she said. “It’s too much trash. People should be more conscientious.”  She did not provide her name. 

By the following day, the cleaning crews had collected 85 tons of litter. In two days, the time it took for the Ministries Esplanade to become green and beautiful again, 260 workers had carted away over 160 tons. 

“That is 55 tons more than we collected after the same celebration last year, when we collected 105 tons,” said Divino Santana, the operations coordinator of the city’s sanitation service. “This shows that the party was much bigger.”

But where did all that waste go?  

The garbage went to the municipal landfill on the city’s outskirts, where the federal district began dumping its garbage 45 year ago -- four year after the founding of Brasíilia. The landfill now covers 196 hectares, or about 485 acres. There, hundreds of men and women, many of them from the surrounding slums, sift through the garbage looking for items they can sell to recycling companies to make a little cash. They have no special equipment or clothing to protect their health.