Luncheon Report
As the engineer in charge of Planning for CEAMSE, Marcela DeLuca has twenty years’ experience in designing and supervising the implementation of strategies for collecting, sorting and disposing of garbage in the city of Buenos Aires and surroundings.
Marcela mentioned the difficulties encountered with the collection of residues. There is a lack of information in large segments of the citizenship about the proper way to dispose of the recyclables in particular. She told us that plastics are 22% of the total solid waste, their volume increasing in the summer time. There is a clear need for stringent packaging laws to minimize packaging and to use lightweight recyclable materials whenever possible and for these laws to be effectively enforced once approved. Ideally, laws should place the bulk of the responsibility on the producers of plastic items. In addition to packaging materials, soft drink and water bottles and automobile tires also add significant volume to trash.
“Circular Economy” projects aim at increasing resource efficiency and reducing the environmental impact of waste by recycling to make new products or developing new uses for waste materials such as the production of lightweight building bricks or the introduction of waste-to-energy technologies to generate electricity and thermal power. This controlled burning of trash produces minimal air and water pollution and reduces the need to use fossil fuels.
At the moment in Buenos Aires only 13% of the collected waste is recovered for the Circular Economy. The goal is to increase this percentage.
After her presentation Marcela answered questions from members and guests. As an exception the President suggested switching to Spanish for the questions and answers exchange. Finally, Marcela was presented with a photograph by Masako Kano as a token of the UWC’s gratitude.
Submitted by Mariel Birnbaumer
Luncheon Announcement
We have been seeing and hearing a lot of Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish activist who has raised her voice concerning the path the world has taken toward the destruction of our environment. According to the World Bank, the world creates 3.5 tons of waste a day. Will future generations be living on landfills? How much waste ultimately lands in our oceans? Many things cannot be recycled, what happens to them?
Recycling changes solid waste into new products, thus reducing the amount of material destined for landfills or just left in open spaces. Recycling is a costly affair in the beginning. Many argue that the mere collection of waste materials itself pollutes the environment, before actual recycling even begins.
Perhaps our guest speaker Marcela De Luca can answer some of these questions and fill us in on what is currently happening in Buenos Aries with the recycling program. She is presently working at Ceamse (the company in charge of waste management in the metropolitan area) as engineer and planning manager. Marcela is a chemical engineer and has a master’s degree in Sanitary Engineering. She is the Director of the Sanitary Engineering Institute at the School of Engineering, University of Buenos Aires.