Peru -Environmental expert’s sound alarm on plastic pollution; call for action

Location: Lima, Peru

Language: Spanish

Duration: 00:06:47

Source: A24

Restrictions: A24 Subscribers

Dateline: 28-02-2022

Storyline

Plastic pollution has been posing a major environmental threat to the city of Lima, Peru, as sea animals bear the brunt of the environmental crisis. The founder of a recycling organization sounded the alarm on the issue and said what adds injury to insult is that the municipal waste management systems in the capital seem to not use allocated places with the right infrastructure to dispose of the waste; so, waste could disperse by the winds, moving it eventually into the sea. Environmental experts, nevertheless, say this could be solved by adopting the “reduce and reuse” method whereby waste should not be thrown in the garbage altogether, but things that can be used should be retrieved and put to other uses. They also note that plastic and material could be easily recycled and reused. The challenge remains, however, that not a lot know about this, which necessitates raising awareness about recycling.

Shotslist

• Interview with (Francisca Barrios- founder of the “Heroes del Planeta” organization)

“Hi, I am Francisca Barrios and the founder of Heroes del Planeta. Heroes del Planeta is a circular economy model where we recycle the plastic of the artisanal fishing in Pucusana and convert it into everyday objects.

Mainly, in this area that is south of Lima, I believe that one of the principal focuses is certainly plastic and the waste discarded by this artisanal fishing activity, but also there is another pollution source such as rivers, which function as “waste conveyor belts” from the mainland to the sea and also, the municipal waste management systems that often don’t dispose the garbage in sanitary landfills that have the necessary infrastructure for the treatment of this waste and therefore leave it in places that can have, for example, many winds that then disperse this waste that is generated on land but that finally ends up being dispersed in marine ecosystems.”

• Interview with (Gabriela Graciela Villegas Vásquez – Agronomist and Environmental Expert, specialist in recovery, maintenance and conservation of urban green areas, elaboration and development of Municipal projects. She currently works at the Metropolitan Municipality of Lima.):

“The biggest sources of pollution in Lima are the beaches, like, there are beaches in both Callao and Lima. The largest pollution focus is found on the beaches. The residents go to the beach and everything is concentrated there and it’s stored there, that’s the main problem. And there, as a consequence, the marine fauna. The fish, little by little… Actually, it was already found;

there is a team of biologists that has shown what they have found in fish, so a lot of marine fauna is affected, right? for this contamination.

We must segregate waste because in this way we can, first, learn and get used to it because everything starts from habit; get used to not eliminating things together to be able to reuse them because we need to reduce the quantity that already exists and that is already saturating, and that is already, well, almost flooding us. So what we have to do is separate to be able to reuse, we reuse and also reduce the quantity, right? So there are many, many activities and many things that can be done with this that we are going to reuse, this, we are going to build, we are going to donate, we are going to improve because for many years we have been supplying all kinds of constructions with the reused material, with the plastic There is still a lot of work to do. After all, there are still sectors that don’t know about it, we need to separate, we need to segregate, so in this way, we are going to reduce and reuse.”

• Interview with (Adriana De Marzi – Graphic designer):

“Pollution in Peru is a serious problem because tons of plastic waste are found daily in the rivers and the seas. These plastics take hundreds of years to biodegrade and in the end, the animals are the ones that consume them, and we, ourselves, the human beings, the same.”

• Interview with (Francisco Aka- Entrepreneur and owner of Aka Sushi restaurant):

“My restaurant is eco-friendly, we at the restaurant try to minimize all types of plastic consumption; Unfortunately, we don’t do it at 100%, it’s a little hard to reach 100%, but we have compostable sugarcane containers, paper bags, paper security seals for the packages and everything is done in a bio-friendly manner.

The options exist, what happens is that the added value of that rises, that is, the issue, those who have a small business see it as more expensive and want to maintain the same prices. That perhaps is the problem that anyone can tell you, the matter of the prices. But, if your product is good and you sell it with that added value and you inform the person that they are paying to minimize that blow, because people are going to pay for it, in the end, the customer is the one who pays for it, I think there is no problem.”

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