SAN SALVADOR, Sept 17 (NNN-AGENCIES) — A blanket of multi-colored plastic waste flowing in from tributaries covers Lake Suchitlan in El Salvador.
Fizzy drink bottles, medication packets, tattered flipflops: all sorts of plastic rubbish can be found floating on 13,500-hectare Lake Suchitlan, which serves as a reservoir for a power plant and is considered by UNESCO to be a wetland of international importance.
This contamination is unprecedented, says Jacinto Tobar, the mayor of Potonico, a small village 100km north of San Salvador in Chalatenango department.
“The fauna and flora are suffering a lot” and there are ever fewer tourists, he said.
With a population of 2,500, Potonico is the most affected of 15 riverside villages.
The state body that administers the reservoir employs dozens of workers to clean the lake by hand.
Some locals also help out with the task, which Tobar says will take three to four months to complete.
“What can we hope for in the future if we don’t look after our environment, if we soil our streets, rivers, lakes, forests and beaches,” said President Nayib Bukele earlier this week at the launch of a “Zero Rubbish” campaign.
Environment minister Fernando Lopez said the country generates 4,200 tonnes of waste a day, of which 1,200 tonnes end up in rivers, beaches and streets.
One of the worst affected areas of the Central American Caribbean coast is the beaches of the Omoa region in Honduras.
It is a beautiful coastline with abundant vegetation and palm trees, about 200km north of Tegucigalpa.
But in some places the sand is almost entirely covered with plastic waste of all sorts, including syringes.
Every year, about 20,000 tonnes of plastic waste comes through the Las Vacas river, a tributary of the Motagua, according to The Ocean Cleanup, a Dutch non-governmental organisation.
Most of that comes from a landfill in the Guatemalan capital.
Environmental activists say the problem must be tackled at its source.
Ricardo Navarro, president of the Center of Appropriate Technology, says only 30 per cent of the waste floats; the rest sinks to the bottom of the bodies of water.
Meaning what is visible, quite literally, is just the tip of the iceberg.
The United Nations Environment Programme says 11 million metric tons of plastic enters the world’s oceans every year, and warns that number could triple in the next 20 years. — NNN-AGENCIES
