Economics Linked to Border Waste Problems at Meeting

Environmental activists, academics and public officials from Mexico and the United States met here Saturday for what is believed to have been the first grass-roots conference on environmental tensions along the border.

Alternating between languages and occasionally groping for words--like the Spanish for sewage--about 100 participants spent the day defining and discussing ways to resolve problems posed by hazardous wastes, sewage, pesticides and other pollutants along the border.

The meeting happened to coincide with news of the arrest of a Mexican oil-company worker found allegedly dumping sludge in the California desert last week. His arrest came just days after the two countries signed an agreement aimed at controlling the flow of toxic wastes.

“Border situations in general are always complicated because lines of authority are quite different, and here are two different cultural traditions and languages,” said Mike McCloskey, acting executive director of the Sierra Club, which co-sponsored the event.

“And, economic development is different (on either side of the border),” he added. “There’s some relation between environmentalism and stages of economic development.”

Economics surfaced repeatedly as the crux of the problems discussed:

- The booming Southern California economy and the prospect of jobs north of the border has lured families from impoverished areas of Mexico to Tijuana. The population is doubling every nine years, and up to 50% of all residents are not served by piped water or sewers.

- Mexico’s profound economic problems have prevented the government from making the capital investment needed for sewers and sewage treatment. About 5 million gallons of raw sewage are believed to flow daily into the Tijuana River and into the United States.

- The rising cost of proper disposal of hazardous wastes in the United States is expected to result in increased attempts to get rid of wastes cheaply in Mexico. Recently, there have been instances of illegal dumping and attempts by Mexicans to make money by recycling U.S. wastes.

- Some toxic agricultural chemicals that the United States can afford to ban have remained in use in Mexico, or have been exported there. Speakers said traces of banned chemicals have turned up in border regions of the United States, having migrated from Mexico.

“Preserving the environment, to a country like Mexico, to some extent it becomes a luxury,” said Carlos de la Parra Renteria of the Colegio de la Frontera Norte, the Mexican border think tank that co-sponsored the event.

McCloskey said an added difficulty in attempting to resolve environmental problems along borders is that they are often elevated to the level of international diplomacy. That makes it impossible, he said, to “treat localized problems as localized problems.”

The workshop on sewage disposal and coastal pollution drew the largest crowd, reflecting the subject’s high priority in the public mind. The participants included environmentalists, surfers, engineers, students and public officials from Tijuana and San Diego.

De la Parra and Alan Sakarias, of the Sierra Club, faulted all three solutions to the border sewage problem being proposed by U.S. and Mexican officials, suggesting instead a decentralized system of sewage collection and reuse of waste water for irrigation.

They contended that proposals for a new treatment plant in the United States to handle some of Tijuana’s sewage, or for a sewer line pumping Tijuana sewage to San Diego’s Point Loma plant, ignore the fact that nearly half of Tijuana’s sewage never reaches sewage lines.

As for a Mexican government proposal to pipe Tijuana’s sewage south for treatment in biological lagoons and disposal in the surf, they said the system would be expensive and could harm public health on both nations’ beaches.

Many of the participants called for systems in which treated waste water could be reused in the water-poor Tijuana area. Others pointed out that some experimental water reclamation systems have encountered difficulty disposing of the leftover solid waste.

For example, Walter Konopka, a San Diego city official, described San Diego’s experimental program of using hyacinths to purify waste water. The program is relatively inexpensive, he said, but it generates large quantities of hyacinths for which there is currently little use.

And while the hyacinths can absorb toxics, “you then have a hyacinth disposal problem.”

Luis Sanchez, a consultant to the Mexican federal environmental agency, suggested two inexpensive systems of treating domestic waste water currently being used in suburbs of Mexico City. One involves treatment by aquaculture--again, using plants to treat sewage--and the other produces fertilizer.

However, other participants countered that such systems would be of limited use in Tijuana because nearly half of all homes have no piped water.