Victoria officials report on their visit to a Nicaraguan landfill

Hundreds of acres of burning, smouldering garbage-that’s how The Capital Regional District’s manager of solid waste, Alan Summers, describes the dump in Managua, Nicaragua.

“You can smell the dump miles away,” he says. And there’s no point euphemistically calling it a “landfill.” He says,

“It really is a dump. It really is.”

It’s also home, to as many as 2,500 people.

Summers, along with city of Victoria finance director Mike McCliggott, civic services manager Terry Snow, and city councillor Sonya Chandler, visited the dump as part of a trip made at the end of July to the Central American country. This was Summers’ second visit to Nicaragua working on a project to help develop landfill alternatives, and the fourth exchange of officials between the two jurisdictions.

As the person responsible for the CRD’s Hartland landfill, Summers doesn’t usually have to contend with people making their homes or scavenging on the site. “We have a secure landfill,” he says.

In Managua, however, when a truck arrives and drops its load, the people who live there rip into it with claw-like metal diggers, searching for anything of value, anything that can be scavenged.

Add to that image the fact that in Nicaragua, there is no waste separation to speak of. Hazardous waste, hospital waste, metal, glass and food all arrive together. “It wasn’t a good situation at all,” says Summers. After the scavengers are done, he says, the waste is burned in the open air.

Chandler, who volunteered for the trip after a change in city manager left a ticket free, uses words like “wild” and “intense” to describe the scene. “It’s like a whole little world right there on the dump. It’s a community,” she says. “It was incredible to see that kind of community right there in such a horrific setting.”

There are so many children living on the dump, she says, that a non-profit agency has started a school on the site.

The Victoria contingent was in Nicaragua to help local councils plan and raise funds for a modern landfill. Under the plan, the Managua dump and two dumps in Tipitapa, a small city outside Managua, would be closed. A new landfill would be started in an old quarry to take waste from both cities. At the new site, workers-perhaps the people now living on the dump-would be employed to separate wastes so that glass and metal can be recycled and organic materials can be composted.

In the CRD, by the way, we’ve been separating waste since 1989 through the blue box program, an effort that has reduced the amount of trash going into the Hartland landfill, which has been recognized for some of its more enviro-forward methods. When scavenging happens here, it is generally at the source, with people searching blue boxes for bottles that can be returned for a deposit. There are ongoing efforts to reduce CRD waste further, with pilot programs underway to encourage apartment dwellers to recycle and to remove compostable waste from garbage.

Certainly, says Summers, there are some very basic things that need to change in Nicaragua. The Managua dump, which serves 1.3 million people, is particularly disastrous. “It’s right on the lake front of Lake Managua. The leachate is pouring into the lake and the lake is dead,” he says.

(Ironically, the Victorian travellers were in Nicaragua during a month where an environment ministry report said the CRD has created two contaminated sites by dumping raw sewage in the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Hartland’s leachate is released into the strait from the MacAulay Point outfall. CRD officials have in the past argued that the saltwater quickly dilutes toxins from the leachate. But that’s another story.)

If the Managua dump were cleaned up and the leachate contained, Summers says, it would take the lake two decades to recover. There is a plan to stop using the dump, cap it and seal the sides to stop the leachate from escaping, but it will be expensive and needs to be weighed against other priorities, he adds.

On the latest visit, funded by the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, the Victoria contingent was helping the local councillors look for funding to start constructing the new landfill. For phase one, says Summers, they need about $3 million.

Visits to four or five embassies, plus a conference call with the International Development Bank, resulted in a commitment from the Italian government to contribute up to $150,000. The Canadian International Development Agency will hopefully match those funds. It’s far from covering the whole cost, but it’s a start.

“Although nothing has been documented, it was fairly successful,” Summers says.

“We need to follow up just to get the paper trail in order.”

While one might suspect this is a one-way relationship, that’s not the case. For one thing, says Chandler, it’s great to see people with differing politics working on a common goal. Nicaragua’s politics, where the leftist Sandinistas overthrew a corrupt government in 1979, have long been polarized. But everyone agrees they need to do a better job managing their wastes, she says, and are working together to do it. “They identified solid waste as an issue, and they are running with it.”

Also, she says, the visit was a good “reminder to be thankful for what is right [here in Canada] and what is happening and what we do have in our country. Obviously there are a good chunk of us that are more privileged then the other part of us, but in the grand scheme of things there’s so much to be thankful for.”

We take for granted, she says, that we’ll generally be safe on city streets, that the water from the tap will be drinkable and the air will be clean. You can go outside, she says, without enduring the smell of burning plastic.

Depending on how fundraising efforts go, says Summers, there are plans for local officials to return to Nicaragua to continue with the project. “It’s been a real honour, a real privilege to be part of the solution.” M