SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - Thousands of volunteers scooped up beer cans, syringes, plastic bags and other trash on Puerto Rico's coastline Saturday in an event intended to both clean the beaches and call attention to what activists and government officials say is a growing garbage problem.
The U.S. territory is not meeting its own legally mandated recycling goals. Calls to ban plastic bags that choke waterways and tumble along roads have gone unheeded. And the landfills -- often ill-managed and polluting -- are near overflowing. With space on the island limited, environmentalists say, Puerto Rico is simply generating too much trash and running out of places to put it.
"Puerto Rico must, must take action," said Pedro Nieves Miranda, director of the Environmental Quality Board. "The island is not growing."
The problem begins with a consumer-driven population on an island that produces one of the highest amounts of trash per capita when compared with U.S. mainland states, according to the Sierra Club.
Authorities say there is little appetite for reducing waste among citizens and the government, so marketing campaigns promoting recycling have made little headway.
Such attitudes have also helped stall efforts to legislate the kind of plastic bag ban increasingly being implemented in a number of cities -- including one that took effect recently in Mexico's capital.
Meanwhile other kinds of plastic, along with bottles and cans and the like, are going largely unrecycled.
Of the 11,000 tons (10,000 metric tons) of garbage Puerto Rico generates per day, only 11 per cent is recycled -- far short of the 35 per cent rate mandated by law -- said Eli Diaz Atienza, executive director of Solid Waste Management. His agency blames poor recycling habits among islanders for failing to meet the target.
Waste that could otherwise be recycled and reused is helping drive the nation's 29 landfills to the brink of capacity. It's not clear exactly how full each landfill is, because operators are not required to keep tabs on how much or what kind of trash they receive. Yet according to the best estimates, space is running out.
"Right now, the landfills have between 20 to 25 years of life left," Diaz said. "But the studies are old, and we need new numbers."
Expanding or building new landfills is not an option because there is no room on the 3,500 square-mile (8,900 square-kilometre) island, and the government cannot afford to export its trash, Miranda said.
And the existing dumps, built in the early 1970s, are often mismanaged ecological nightmares that leak into the groundwater.
The Environmental Protection Agency ordered five of the island's landfills to close for safety and health reasons nearly four years ago, but they remain open as operators dispute the findings.
"I would say it's getting worse," EPA regional administrator Judith Enck said of landfill management on the island. "Virtually all of them are violating environmental standards."
Puerto Rico is looking into the possibility of constructing plants that would burn organic waste and convert it into energy, which officials say could cut back on garbage glut. Yet each one would cost up to $500 million -- a steep price tag on an island entering its fourth year of recession -- and the government has failed so far to find a company interested in building one, Diaz said.
Camilla Feibelman, the Sierra Club's co-ordinator in Puerto Rico, said what the island really needs to do is step up recycling and consider steep fines for those who violate litter laws.
"Public service announcements haven't worked," she said. "People have to feel there's a risk to throwing trash out the window."
Saturday's beach cleanup, overseen by the Ocean Conservancy, collected an estimated 130,000 pounds (59,000 kilograms) by the afternoon, and organizers expected the final total to be double that.
Volunteer Yarimar Coss, 30, said the refuse included things like sofas, car parts and even a sink.
"Clearly, one can see there is a big garbage problem," said Coss, who blamed a lack of awareness among Puerto Ricans. "If you don't see where the garbage falls, you forget about it."
