<
https://www.voanews.com/a/mangrove-forest-thrives-around-what-was-once-latin-america-s-largest-landfill-/7200974.html>
'It was once Latin America's largest landfill. Now, a decade after Rio de
Janeiro shut it down and redoubled efforts to recover the surrounding expanse
of highly polluted swamp, crabs, snails, fish and birds are once again
populating the mangrove forest.
"If we didn't say this used to be a landfill, people would think it's a farm.
The only thing missing is cattle," jokes Elias Gouveia, an engineer with
Comlurb, the city's garbage collection agency that is shepherding the
plantation project. "This is an environmental lesson that we must learn from:
Nature is remarkable. If we don't pollute nature, it heals itself."
Gouveia, who has worked with Comlurb for 38 years, witnessed the Gramacho
landfill recovery project's timid first steps in the late 1990s.
The former landfill is located right by the 148 square miles (383 square
kilometers) Guanabara Bay. Between the landfill's inauguration in 1968 and
1996, some 80 million tons of garbage were dumped in the area, polluting the
bay and surrounding rivers with trash and runoff.
In 1996, the city began implementing measures to limit the levels of pollution
in the landfill, starting with treating some of the leachate, the toxic
byproduct of mountains of rotting trash. But garbage continued to pile up until
2012, when the city finally shut it down.
"When I got there, the mangrove was almost completely devastated, due to the
leachate, which had been released for a long time, and the garbage that arrived
from Guanabara Bay," recalled Mario Moscatelli, a biologist hired by the city
in 1997 to assist officials in the ambitious undertaking.'
Via
Future Crunch:
<
https://futurecrunch.com/good-news-breastfeeding-trachoma-iraq-golden-lion-tamarin-brazil/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
