Environmental expert’s sound alarm on plastic pollution; call for action

Lima/ Peru- Plastic pollution has been posing a major environmental threat to the city of Lima, Peru, as sea animals bear the brunt of the environmental crisis.

The founder of a recycling organization sounded the alarm on the issue and said what adds injury to insult is that the municipal waste management systems in the capital seem to not use allocated places with the right infrastructure to dispose of the waste; so, waste could disperse by the winds, moving it eventually into the sea.

“There is another pollution source such as rivers, which function as “waste conveyor belts” from the mainland to the sea and also, the municipal waste management systems that often don’t dispose of the garbage in sanitary landfills that have the necessary infrastructure for the treatment of this waste,” said Francisca Barrios- founder of the “Heroes del Planeta” organization

Environmental experts, nevertheless, say this could be solved by adopting the “reduce and reuse” method whereby waste should not be thrown in the garbage altogether, but things that can be used should be retrieved and put to other uses.

“So what we have to do is separate to be able to reuse, we reuse and also reduce the quantity, right? So there are many, many activities and many things that can be done with this that we are going to reuse, this, we are going to build, we are going to donate, we are going to improve because for many years we have been supplying all kinds of constructions with the reused material, with the plastic There is still a lot of work to do,” said Gabriela Graciela Villegas Vásquez.

They also note that plastic and material could be easily recycled and reused. The challenge remains, however, that not a lot know about this, which necessitates raising awareness about recycling.

“Pollution in Peru is a serious problem because tons of plastic waste are found daily in the rivers and the seas. These plastics take hundreds of years to biodegrade and in the end, the animals are the ones that consume them, and we, ourselves, the human beings, the same.”