Garbage-Selecting Plants in Mexico City: A Stage Set for Modernity

Abstract

In 1984, the opening of a Dirección General de Servicios Urbanos (dgsu; General Office for Urban Services) , created within the then Mexico City government (Departamento del Distrito Federal; ddf) as an agency that would take charge of managing solid waste, was an attempt to modernize the city's system of treatment and final disposition of waste. All the existing open garbage dumps were closed, except one in Santa Catarina, and three plants for classifying and treating solid waste were built. The intention was to control the serious environmental consequences of open dumps, as well as improving the life conditions of thousands of scavengers that lived and worked there, by hiring them in the new plants. Furthermore, a sanitary landfill was built, and the only surviving dump was cleaned up.

After great administrative efforts and, above all, huge technological and economic investments, the so longed-for modernization was drowned in a tangle of political and social problems dragged from the previous stage of solid waste management (one that privileged open dumps), imposing the vested interests of certain actors over the social interests implied in any supposedly public service.