Brazil's pollution cleanup: can they - must they - will they?

"We cannot solve problems by using the same kind of things we used when we created them".    Albert Einstein.

Cubatao is a city just forty miles down the hill from Sao Paulo in Brazil.  It lies in a beautiful location, at the base of green tropical mountains, part of the Sierra do Mar range. Its slopes were always full of animals and the Cubatao River was a haven for mullet fishing. But that was a long time ago; before the valley caught the eye of the military regime in the 1960s.  Its position some 20 miles from Santos, Latin America's largest seaport soon turned the city into a focal point for development. 'Growth At Any Cost':  the slogan. Twenty-three Brazilian and multinational companies arrived, creating a sprawl of steel, cement and fertiliser factories.

By the 1970s, the 23 major industries poured out a liquid filth of 22,678 tons of organic matter and 1,467 tons of heavy metal, according to the environment agency. The valley belched out 114,416 tons of particulates belched out from Cubatao's smokestacks every year.  Day and night. The scene was a photographers' visual wet dream. Fantastic colours lit the sunsets, swirling with plumes of smoke and steam, and noxious chemicals. But the stink of the stuff hung there, trapped by the 2,800-foot mountains. Its fumes pushed down people's throats. And around 33,000 tons of highly toxic industrial waste, from Rhone Poulenc's sodium pentachlorophenate (fungicide) plant in Cubatao, got stored in plastic bags in the city landfills.
Soon, this capital of chemicals changed its name. The 'Valley of Death'.  Popular Science ranked it the top of their ten dirtiest places on earth. The people there complained.  Nothing happened.  The fumes increased. The toxic waste dumps grew larger.

Lethal pollution:

In the early 1980s a series of shocks woke people up to the dangers of this hell-hole on earth. A rash of babies were born without brains (although it was difficult to pin these birth defects on the pollution). It topped Brazil's infant mortality rate, and a third of people suffered from pneumonia, TB, emphysema and other breathing sicknesses. Cancer rates grew six-fold. In 1984 the Cubatao River died; tons of heavy metal sank downstream or into the sea.  Then one evening in February 1984, gas began leaking from a pipeline under a favela of wooden shanties. A huge inferno killed 99 people officially (people said it was more like 200). Greenpeace dubbed it the worst corporate crime ever, at the 1992 Rio Environment Summit.

It got worse. In January 1985, 15 inches of acid rain poured down in 48 hours. Hundreds of mudslides ouzed down the mountains.  They blocked the highway to the port and broke an ammonia pipeline.  A 15 ton cloud of the chemical headed for the favela - Villa Parisis.  It created havoc for the five thousand residents.  There was a mass evacuation.  The officials could no longer deny these disasters.  The Sao Paulo State Governor declared an emergency and mandated the pollution control agency to act.

Good timing:

These disasters occurred within a couple of years of each other. Good news! It may sound callous, but it's significant. Brazil has always been a country of extreme inequality.  No one cared about poor people.  Brazil's military government was mired in corruption. But 1985, things started to come together.  The overthrow of the junta in Brazil in 1985 brought back democracy. This opened up the way for protests, according to De Mello Lemos (World Bank, 1998), now that the media was free again. A citizens' association (APVM), "victims of pollution and bad living conditions", could now focus the debate on the personal costs of this mess.  They had high level support from state government, as well as international outrage at the devastation. The changes probably cut back the privileges of the entrenched industrialists. De Mello Lemos says the rules of the political game had changed.  Progressive bureaucrats could ally with this vocal local activism.  Industrialists could no longer get away with murder.

I stress all this: it's a bit like the experiences of alcoholics.  A Danish medic once told me it was only after he woke one morning in the gutter that he faced the reality of his drinking. These disasters, too, the huge toil on health, and the persistence of the pollution victims were potent ingredients of this cocktail.

Clean-up:

One thing Cubatao had going for it was legislation.  Brazil already had strict environment laws (not very much enforced).  Also the state environmental protection agency (CETESB) had a sole authority and the expertise to sort out the pollution. So it set about forcing the factories to clean up their acts.  It needed a clear strategy and persistent support from above and below.  And CETESB got them. Its president, Werner Zulaauf, ordered the factories to change within five years or face big fines. "The industrialists immediately started telephoning the Governor.  But the Governor refused to take their calls. He told them to see me", he said to James Brooke (for his New York Times article on the clean-up, June 15 1991). 

The industrialists started to negotiate timetables and technologies for cleaning things up.They installed filters, scrubbers and precipitators (costing $300 million) to cut the emmissions by 72 percent, down to about 32,000 tons a year. Companies managed to cut the flow of organic wastes by 93 percent and the flow of heavy metals by 97 percent. So far, says NYT's James Brooke, the companies have spent $420 million on the clean-up.  But winning the battle has not been easy, according toTyler Bridges (Christian Science Monitor, May 23 1988).  CETESB has to levied $1.2 million in fines on the 23 industrial companies since 1984, to get it sorted.  There is still more to be done.  The biggest problem has been Brazil's third largest steel producer, Cossipa.  But a National Geographic program today (March 12th) says it has now invested over $200 million in emprovements.  Said a worker:  "today, we recycle steel.  For each dollar we spend in production, we now spend another dollar in the clean-up". Presidente Barnardes are to built a new recycling factory (see photo), they reported in 2007.

For the people of Cubatao, the change has been dramatic, even though there is still some way to go.  NYT's James Brooke watched (in 1991) Cleiton Cello Silva catching fish in the River again. The 13-year-old got his first fish within an hour.  Today, there is a mantle of ghreen trees and bushes over the mountains where once there were dead tree trunks. A helicopter sprayed the bare mountainsides with 130,000 tree seeds in gelatin pellets. Health clinics report that infant mortality has dropped in half.  Smog alerts are a thing of the past. The city has established four "ecological parks";  environmental education is on the syllabus of all schools, there are bicycle pathways and a new sewaghe system.  Even Brazil's world famous landscape architect, Burie Marx, has been roped in to design a parkway entrance to the City. It's been very hard work.  But new industries want to locate there now. Said Werner Zulauf:  "The Mayor has managed to make lemonade from the lemon". The Mayor's new campaign reads: "Cubatao - City Symbol of Ecology". Of course, there are many places in Brazil with terrible pollution problems, but they can see now that change is possible, even though it may take ten years to complete.

My soapbox:

To me, this is the way to go.  I've always found climate change boring. Not that it isn't important.  What I hate is listening to polititicians pontificating and then not doing very much.  They say that news is socially constructed.  Well, it's about time they built it a bit differently. I hate the guilt tripping we get dished out papers like The Guardian, and endless the I'm living an eco-friendly life programmes of the BBC. Climate change gets presented either as something too complicated for the like to understand, or we get patronised with simple diagrams. It does my head in.  I'm going to start a pressure group:  No More Promises: Only Action; to prevent the BBC reporting political summits on this and that.  They will only report the changes they've made. No wonder younger people are bored by politics in Europe.

Yes, I do what I can. I don't run the tap water while while I'm cleaning my teeth. Of course. But I see precious little happening around me.  The kids in my neighbourhood still drop their chewing gum in the street.  The local authority still won't take much for recycling. No one believes the government has reached its emmissions target cuts any longer. I think local change-arounds like this in developing in places like China, India, Indnesia, and Bangladesh, financed partly by the rich world could do much to bring countries together more productively than merely fighting over targets for the post-Kyoto agreement.  And it's much more exciting too.

Thanks Amyjudd for giving me the idea.  More will follow on pollution changes.  And thanks to Esta for her soapbox!