MEXICO.- When the government of Mexico City established the rules for the management of waste derived from the treatment and prevention of the pandemic by COVID – 19 , Gabriela Pacheco, furniture manager in the capital, warned apartment owners and tenants of what to do with the garbage.
He said that the correct separation of sanitary waste begins in homes to protect “everyone”, in the words of the mayor, Claudia Sheimbaum, and that it was therefore important to follow these indications:
First, place in a bag of masks, gloves, disposable tissues, gum, toothbrushes, cigarettes, medicine containers, syringes, dressings and gauze. The bag to be used should be sprayed inside and out with a chlorinated water solution (preferably 400 ppm) to which they should add 10 milliliters of commercial chlorine in one liter of water.
And finally mark the bag with a permanent marker, writing the legend “Sanitary waste” that should be put in the inorganic garbage.
All the intentions seemed to go very well in theory but in practice it turned into a disaster.
“Nobody did it” Pacheco recognizes almost two years after those first recommendations that are not law, but suggestions or neither one nor the other; rather, a regulation that anyone who wants to abide by.
Gabriela Pacheco says that no special container has been put in place for that waste because the Residents only separate the masks in the best of cases and then put them together with fruit peels, stale tortillas, stiff bread, cloth garbage, toilet papers, cereal boxes, soda cans… in a lust of waste.
The management of the needy for COVID – 19 has been little cared for in the largest city in the country and in general in most municipalities both by citizens and by the authorities despite the fact that biological-infectious waste increased by 300%, according to domestic testimonies and a study by the Regional Center for Multidisciplinary Research ( CRIM) of the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
Only in Mexico, it is calculated that 81. 2 million face masks are discarded daily as well as 9.6 million tons of plastic whose whereabouts are not very well known.
The only thing that is officially known from the third government report of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the Federal Attorney for Environmental Protection (Profepa) stated that 489 visits were made to 305 to generating companies, hospitals and clinics, both public (ISSSTE, IMSS and the Health Sector), and private; and 184 to companies that provide garbage management services.
Of these reviews 15 companies were closed for failing to comply with environmental regulations and imposed measures to regulate mainly the authorized storage capacity of up to three times its capacity, in addition to classifying and storing dangerous infectious biological waste in accordance with the NOM – 81 – SEMARNAT 1995.
“With this, Profepa guarantees the services of adequate management ”, he pointed out.
Bad practices
But the government’s intention constantly collides with the bad practices of the citizens. When in the buildings managed by Pacheco (one of six departments and another of nine) they do their part well and put the masks in plastic bags like good citizens, the garbage collectors empty the contents and stir everything to separate the plastic.
“They are told not to take it out but they keep doing it”, complaint.
In other cases, asymptomatic people with the disease only use the mask to allow them to enter the stores or have free transit through the municipality. And after their daily work they throw them on the public highway without caring that they can become a serious health problem.
In hospitals, some doctors ask that patients infected with COVID – 19 who use disposable tableware and these are also turned in the garbage carts infecting the collection workers, taking lives and infections.
Garbage collectors say that the majority of citizens do not separate the garbage and that the authorities do not give them the necessary equipment for their work and that they are very exposed. “As much as they give us protective equipment, it is unsuccessful, citizens do not understand and they throw everything away,” says René Molina, a city worker in the Escandón neighborhood in CDMX.
To avoid this type of contagion, in the State of Mexico collectors were forbidden to open bags with COVID sanitary waste and they have to arrive intact at their final disposal, where they are incinerated. But in many municipalities there are no policies in this regard.
In Villahermosa, for example, last year 52 infections (11 clerks; 14 collectors; nine workers cleaning and maintenance; 18 operators in public spaces) and eight deaths ( five from operators of public spaces; two collectors and one in the central machinery warehouse)
There are also cities without information on the number of infections, such as Guadalajara, Tonalá, Tlajomulco de Zúñiga and San Pedro Tlaquepaque, four of the five municipalities that make up the Guadalajara Metropolitan Area, Jalisco, because the collection is concessioned to a company (Caabsa Eagle) that does not report to the authorities.
Based on SEMARNAT data from 2020, the 10% of the municipalities in Mexico do not provide public garbage collection service, in such a way that this waste is left there without being collected and with the rains they have ended to rivers and seas along with those that have been collected by municipal garbage that remain in the open.
According to the United Nations Environment Program, management of sanitary waste needs classification, separation in containers, color coding, labeling, signaling, handling, transport, storage, treatment and final disposal. Mexico still does not have a law with a budget labeled for it.
COVID – 19
Estimated positive cases 4. 08 million
Estimated deaths 306, 013
Estimated assets 19, 654
Source: Federal Government (Conacyt)
Update: 21 November 2021
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