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Mexico City closes one of world’s largest dumps

  • Posted on December 20, 2011 at 8:06 am

MEXICO CITY?? Mexico City will close one of the world’s largest garbage dumps by Dec. 31 and will instead turn the garbage from millions of people into reusable materials and energy, Mayor Marcelo Ebrard announced Monday.

Some 700 trucks that carry garbage to the Bordo Poniente will no longer be admitted as of Monday, and all operations will cease by the end of the year, Ebrard said.

Trucks will still enter the recycling separation plant and a composting plant already on the premises.

The city that once dumped 12,600 tons of garbage daily already has cut the amount in half this year through recycling and composting, said government undersecretary Juan Jose Garcia Ochoa.

The concrete giant Cemex SAB has agree to buy 3,000 tons daily to turn into energy, Garcia said. The city is seeking other landfills to dump the remaining garbage in smaller amounts while it institutes a new recycling program in the new year.

Built on a dry lake bed partly to handle the rubble from the devastating 1985 earthquake, Bordo Poniente has taken in more than 76 million tons of trash.

Closing the dump will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by a minimum of 2 million tons of carbon dioxide a year, according to the city government.

Ebrard said the city is implementing strict measures to stop illegal dumping at the site and to process materials into compost. It will also embark next year on a major project to harness the methane gas produced at the dump into energy, he said.

Ebrard said the city also plans to open a new plant to recycle construction waste into building material.

The Mexican capital itself has about 8.8 million residents, but its metropolitan area holds more than 20 million.

The city has been working for years to turn one of the planet’s biggest and messiest waste management systems into the greenest, at least in Latin America.

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Three years ago, the city recycled only 6 percent of its garbage. Today, that number is close to 60 percent, having grown substantially in the last year, Garcia said.

The city says it is also negotiating with 1,500 pepenadores, or scavengers, informal workers who traditionally have been a key part of Mexico’s waste-management system. They living at dumps and scavenge and resell material.

Pablo Tellez Falcon, who heads the scavengers guild, said 300 of them worked at the Bordo Poniente landfill and that he will negotiate for a written agreement with the city government so they don’t lose their livelihoods.

He said the city and the scavengers have only had a spoken agreement until now.

Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45728974/ns/us_news-environment/

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New U.N. climate deal struck, critics say gains modest

  • Posted on December 12, 2011 at 5:16 am

By Nina Chestney and Jon Herskovitz

DURBAN | Sun Dec 11, 2011 3:49am EST

DURBAN (Reuters) – Climate negotiators agreed a pact on Sunday that would for the first time force all the biggest polluters to take action on greenhouse gas emissions, but critics said the action plan was not aggressive enough to slow the pace of global warming.

The package of accords extended the Kyoto Protocol, the only global pact that enforces carbon cuts, agreed the format of a fund to help poor countries tackle climate change and mapped out a path to a legally binding agreement on emissions reductions.

But many small island states and developing nations at risk of being swamped by rising sea levels and extreme weather said the deal marked the lowest common denominator possible and lacked the ambition needed to ensure their survival.

Agreement on the package, reached in the early hours of Sunday, avoided a collapse of the talks and spared the blushes of host South Africa, whose stewardship of the two weeks of often fractious negotiations came under fire from rich and poor nations.

“We came here with plan A, and we have concluded this meeting with plan A to save one planet for the future of our children and our grandchildren to come,” said South African Foreign Minister Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, who chaired the talks.

“We have made history,” she said, bringing the hammer down on Durban conference, the longest in two decades of U.N. climate negotiations.

Delegates agreed to start work next year on a new legally binding treaty to cut greenhouse gases to be decided by 2015 and to come into force by 2020.

The process for doing so, called the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action, would “develop a new protocol, another legal instrument or agreed outcome with legal force” that would be applicable under the U.N. climate convention.

That phrasing, agreed at a last-ditch huddle in the conference centre between the European Union, India, China and the United States, was used by all parties to claim victory.

Britain’s Energy and Climate Secretary Chris Huhne said the result was “a great success for European diplomacy.”

“We’ve managed to bring the major emitters like the U.S., India and China into a roadmap which will secure an overarching global deal,” he said.

U.S. climate envoy Todd Stern said Washington was satisfied with the outcome: “We got the kind of symmetry that we had been focused on since the beginning of the Obama administration. This had all the elements that we were looking for.”

Yet U.N. climate chief Christiana Figueres acknowledged the final wording on the legal form a future deal was ambiguous: “What that means has yet to be decided.”

A U.N. spokesman said the final texts might not all be publicly available for some days.

Environmentalists said governments wasted valuable time by focusing on a handful of specific words in the negotiating text, and failed to raise emissions cuts to a level high enough to reduce global warming.

Sunday’s deal follows years of failed attempts to impose legally-binding, international cuts on emerging giants, such as China and India, as well as rich nations like the United States.

The developed world had already accepted formal targets under a first phase of the Kyoto Protocol, which runs out at the end of next year, although Washington never ratified its commitment.

Sunday’s deal extends Kyoto until the end of 2017, ensuring there is no gap between commitment periods, but EU delegates said lawyers would have to reconcile those dates with existing EU legislation.

LEAST-BAD OPTION

India’s Environment Minister Jayanthi Natarajan, who gave an impassioned speech to the conference denouncing what she said was unfair pressure on Delhi to compromise, said her country had only reluctantly agreed to the accord.

“We’ve had very intense discussions. We were not happy with reopening the text but in the spirit of flexibility and accommodation shown by all, we have shown our flexibility… we agree to adopt it,” she said.

Small island states in the frontline of climate change, said they had gone along with a deal but only because a collapse of the talks was of no help to their vulnerable nations.

“I would have wanted to get more, but at least we have something to work with. All is not lost yet,” said Selwin Hart, chief negotiator on finance for the coalition of small states.

Tosi Mpanu-Mpanu, head of the Africa Group, added: “It’s a middle ground, we meet mid-way. Of course we are not completely happy about the outcome, it lacks balance, but we believe it is starting to go into the right direction.”

U.N. reports released in the last month warned delays on a global agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions will make it harder to keep the average rise to within 2 degrees Celsius over the next century.

“It’s certainly not the deal the planet needs — such a deal would have delivered much greater ambition on both emissions reductions and finance,” said Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists.

“Producing a new treaty by 2015 that is both ambitious and fair will take a mix tough bargaining and a more collaborative spirit than we saw in the Durban conference centre these past two weeks.”

(Reporting by Barbara Lewis, Agnieszka Flak, Andrew Allan, Michael Szabo and Stian Reklev; editing by Jon Boyle)

Source: http://feeds.reuters.com/~r/reuters/scienceNews/~3/KLHwnkcpMdY/us-climate-idUSTRE7B41NH20111211

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