Fishing for trash off Rio

Claire De Oliveira Yahoo News 15 May 09;

RIO DE JANEIRO (AFP) – Sitting in his fishing boat in the bay of Rio de Janeiro, Gabriel has an easy time hauling in his "catch," plucking it from the sea with his own hands, not with a net.

But that's because the bounty he is grabbing isn't fish -- it's the floating trash that sullies the waters of one of the world's most beautiful cities.

Gabriel, a professional fisherman for two decades, is one of an army of boatman-cleaners employed by the state of Rio de Janeiro to remove tons of detritus from the city's spectacular harbor.

"We were catching more and more rubbish in our nets and sometimes it got caught in our boats' propellors and broke them," he explained.

Under a new state program started early this year, he and the crews on another 140 boats head out three times a week to pick up floating junk that can be recycled: plastic bottles, plastic sheets, paper, cardboard. On average, 15 tons of trash are recovered each time.

The initiative, called Baia Limpa (Clean Bay) and sponsored by Brazil's state-run oil company Petrobras, is just the latest attempt in a long string of operations to clear Rio's Guanabara Bay of pollution.

Since 1995, similar operations have sucked up more than a billion dollars, with few results. The zone -- not so far away from the famed open-sea beaches of Copacabana and Ipanema popular with tourists -- remains a maritime dump.

Much of the sewage from Rio's 10 million residents still spills directly into the sea -- which also collects old cars, televisions, tires, refrigerators and other discarded items thrown into rivers swollen during the rainy summer months.

But fishermen frustrated with the poisonous effect on fish stocks, especially from suffocating plastic refuse, aren't giving up, and have signed on to the new Baia Limpa program in the hope it will finally make a difference.

"Ten years ago, you could still live from fishing. You can't today," said Edmo, a 54-year-old who has spent three decades living off the sea.

He and Gabriel and the others are employed for three-month stints to clear away the floating trash, during which they receive financial aid. Nearly 1,200 fishermen are expected to participate by the end of 2009.

The aim, though, is not to supplant fishing altogether -- nor even to return the bay to pristine condition.

A geographer involved in the project, Jamylle Ferreira, told AFP the main goal is to "map the worst zones and to analyse the rubbish."

He added: "We know we won't be able to clean up the bay, but that's not our intention. What we want to do first is learn from the fishermen, who know the worst-hit areas, often at the mouths of the rivers where they live."

But, Ferreira said, in Rio there were some obstacles, notably from district municipalities "that aren't working with us," and which were leaving bags of recovered trash uncollected.

Some of the trash that is picked up goes to a recycling plant installed on the bay and financed by the private sector. Anything that can't be converted is incinerated and used in energy-production.

The plant, which handles 30 tons of garbage a day, is a pilot scheme that authorities hope will spread to other parts of Brazil.

"We sell units that treat 150 tons of trash a day -- which is what a population of 180,000 residents puts out -- for a cost of 15 million dollars," explained the plant's manager, Jorge Nascimento.

Ultimately, the target is to recycle 100 percent of the waste that comes from urban centers. But such an ideal lies some way off, especially in Brazil, where recycling itself its not widespread and only sporadically observed.

For Rio's bay, the impact of the new cleaning program has yet to be measured.

Perhaps the most telling sign will be any indication its slow disappearance -- its sedimentation from the daily avalanche of detritus -- has been slowed.

According to some studies, the bay is filling up slowly but surely and at its current rate could vanish under the tons of sludge within 200 to 500 years.