Bogota Blogger

In Bogota, and in most of Colombia, litter is everywhere.

Monserrate Full of Plastic Bags

On my first or second weekend in the city, some friends took me up Monserrate, one of the major tourist things to do in the city. It was a beautiful sunny Sunday day, and there are hundreds of vendors of all types at the base of the mountain where the train station is and where the trail starts. Then, there are another or so hundred vendors on the trail.

Whatever people buy from these vendors usually comes in some sort of plasitc container, and the plastic containers simply end up thrown down on the trail and the rocks nearby. That day I saw probably THOUSANDS of plastic water bags all over the trail. I was shocked.

On another trip up Monserrate, I noticed that at various intervals there would be a sign asking people to keep their plastic and other trash till they got to the top of the mountain, and to throw it away there. These signs were basically ignored, of course, but I wondered why the authorities didn’t, instead of putting signs, put trash cans at these spots on the trail. 

Plaza Bolivar on Sundays

I love to go to Plaza Bolivar on Sundays, usually on my bike, because the Ciclovia route goes right to it. Downtown on a nice Sunday morning is crowded with all types of people out enjoying the day, vendors of all types, street entertainers, people visiting museums and feeding pigeons, or just hanging out.  It’s a really fun scene and charming and picturesque too, till you look on the ground on the street or on the Plaza Bolivar or on the cathedral steps and see all the crap that’s been left behind–plastic containers of all sorts, styrofoam, newspapers, cigarette butts, half-eaten food.  People just drop their crap wherever they happen to be standing. 

Cleaning Up for Bush

A couple weeks ago, when US President Bush stopped off for just seven hours in Bogota, the city and national governments sent out legions of cleaning men to sweep up Plaza Bolivar.  Appearance is everything, it seems, and President Uribe was pretty anxious to impress his buddy Bush.  What’s really sad is that they would never consider doing such a clean-up for themselves.

Litter All Over the Country

On the beaches in Cartegena and Santa Marta, the country’s two big beach resorts, litter is part of the landscape. A friend of mine who went to the dessert in La Guajira, the far northern part of the country near Venezuela, called it a “desert of plastic.” for all the plastic that had been left behind and is now blowing around the landscape.

Recycling and Trash on the Streets

Another part of the problem is that businesses and residential buildings often put their trash in plastic bags out on the street to be picked up. Then poor people who make their livings by selling to recyclers come along and rip open the bags in order to dig through them for plastic, cardboard, paper, and anything else that can be sold. This leaves the trash from the ripped open bags to be scatted by the wind and further dug through by homeless dogs looking for some food.

Something Oughta Be Done About This

To be fair, the US only made an effort to attack its litter problem in the 1960’s and 1970’s, but today I guess it’s considered pretty uncool to litter, and we have the attitude that only ignorant and uncaring people do it.

I would love to see Colombia start a really massive and nationwide anti-littering campaign. The government could make a big effort to provide places to dispose of trash in the cities and in the tourist attractions, and could employ a lot of people managing this and cleaning up public spaces. After a couple years of this, maybe they could then start some fines, etc. for littering. Supposedly this country is right on the brink of becoming an accepted tourist destination, and not just for brave people. If they could make a dent in their litter problem, it might happen a lot faster and on a larger scale.

What about Tourism?

I have had mixed emotions about Colombia becoming a more and more popular tourist destination. While it would be great for the country in lots of ways, there would of course be some negative effects. But my concern is mostly selfish, since I prefer to keep all the wonderful things about this country to myself and the, relatively speaking, rare number of travellers like me. Lately, though, I’ve started to think that the litter problem might actually keep a lot of folks away, even when the other bad image problems of the country have started to fade. I think about people like my uppper-middle-class sister and her typical suburban family, and how they would never want to come to a place where they felt unclean, no matter what else it might have to offer.  So, I hope Colombia does start to attack this problem, because it’s got implications for more than just the nuisance factor that litter is to folks like me.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 15th, 2007 at 4:47 pm and is filed under This is 1967, The Colombian Way of Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.