DUMPING GROUNDS
Tons of junk, much of it from the USA, piled up to befoul air, water and lives
MEXICALI, Mexico – On the outskirts of this city, where cattle graze and tractors roll across the farmland, a sooty building belches out clouds of smoke.
Twisted scraps of metal and the smashed skeletons of cars sit in piles next to the plant, where machinery hums loudly, punctuated by the booming sounds of metal striking metal.
Across a narrow dirt road, Blanca Ramírez lives in the same farmhouse where she grew up. She remembers when she was a kid, before the steel mill was built, the land across the road was an alfalfa field and the air was clean.
Now smoke pours out of the plant at all hours, drifting over a row of houses and across the fields.
“The pollution has gradually increased because we didn’t used to see as much as we see now,” Ramírez said, standing on the road beside the plant. “It’s terrible.”
The Grupo Simec steel mill is a huge recycling facility. It devours metal scraps and the chassis of old cars, which arrive on trucks from junkyards where they’ve been stripped of parts. The metal goes in dirty, covered with paint and rust, and is melted down
“We didn’t used to see as much as we see now. It’s terrible.” Blanca Ramírez
along with iron ore and carbon coke, then emerges clean as pieces of steel rebar for construction, stacked in bundles on trailers.
Smelting separates impurities from the molten iron and leaves behind waste: heaps of grayish black slag, which in other places have been found to contain calcium, silicon, iron, chromium, manganese, lead, and other metals and pollutants.
Some of the slag is piled inside the compound’s walls. Other mounds of slag have been dumped outside the walls, on the opposite side of the plant from Ramírez’s home, forming a flattened heap beside a trash-strewn ditch and a dry field.
Mexicali and surrounding areas along the border have become a dumping ground for junk, from old appliances to electronic waste to discarded tires, some of which arrives from the United States. There’s money to be made here from some types of junk: Old cars can be dismantled for reusable parts. Old iron and copper can be resold or melted down to make new material. And a whole host of businesses, large and small, legal and illegal, focus on taking in discarded items and recycling anything of value.
The problem with Mexicali’s recycling businesses isn’t what gets recycled. It’s what goes up in the air and what’s cast aside in the process.
All around Mexicali, vacant lots are littered with trash ranging from household garbage to shattered pieces of old computers. In backyards, heaps of plastic and cardboard are collected by unlicensed recyclers. Along the city’s streets, blazing piles of tires and electrical cables send columns of black smoke billowing into the air.
In the junkyards, rows of old cars bake in the sun, leaking oil onto the ground. The cars are cannibalized for parts, and the battered remnants are trucked to the steel mill southeast of the city, where they’re dumped along with pieces of old appliances, rusty iron cables, and a mishmash of discarded railings, gates, racks and barrels.
Elsewhere in Mexicali, where factories known as maquiladoras have proliferated to manufacture products for export, many dumps, scrap yards and recycling businesses have sprung up to take in waste from both Mexico and the United States. Though some of the businesses have licenses and say they’re complying with environmental rules, many others are operating illegally.
The top environmental official in the state of Baja California has acknowledged that despite efforts to shut down illegal dumps, many remain, and the problem is still largely out of control.
The blight goes back years
Mexicali’s recycling businesses, scrapyards and dumpsites create problems that go beyond aesthetics.
Circuit boards in discarded cellphones and electronics, for example, contain toxic pollutants like arsenic, cadmium, lead and mercury. Acid from old car batteries can leak into the soil. Whenever junk is filled with hazardous chemicals, the toxins can leach into the soil and pollute the groundwater as well as water running in ditches.
For years, government officials on both sides of the border have recognized that the widespread unregulated dumping in Mexicali represents a potential hazard.
In a 2012 report, consultants working for the Border Environment Cooperation Commission studied how to improve the city’s deficient garbage collection system and made a list of suggestions. They said that Mexicali’s ditches and drains are badly polluted “due to the large volume of solid wastes” and that polluted water from dumps is flowing into the sewage-filled New River, which crosses the border and continues past a neighborhood in Calexico.
The report said that the trash dumped along ditches and canals has included discarded mattresses, household garbage and other debris and that the “lack of control” adds to the pollution problems. The authors suggested, among other things, cleaning up one of the drains that feeds the New River.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the California EPA have since provided money for cleanups in the city’s ditches and drains. The work has involved pulling out tires, refrigerators, furniture and other debris.
Last year, Baja California’s Environmental Protection Department said it shut down 29 illegal dumpsites covering a total of 250 acres.
“Right now, the problem we see most often is illegal dumps,” said Thelma Castañeda Custodia, the Baja California agency’s secretary.
She said she doesn’t know how many recyclers and junkyards are doing business illegally, but she guesses that for every one that’s legal, three others may be without permits.
Baja California’s Environmental Protection Department provided dozens of inspection documents in response to a request from the Palm Springs Desert Sun. Those documents from 2016 and 2017 included 35 inspections that led to fines, which ranged from the equivalent of $750 to about $6,500. Twelve of those cases involved waste disposal or recycling businesses.
The agency has just four full-time inspectors to enforce environmental rules in Mexicali, and the documents show they’re spending a significant share of their time examining waste businesses and recyclers.
One of the problems along the border, Castañeda said, is the large quantity of used goods that arrive on trucks from the USA and come through customs as secondhand items.
“That’s what has us, especially on the border, stuck with a problem now of accumulating tires and other types of waste – electronics and other types of waste that people simply don’t know where they can dispose of it,” Castañeda said.
From raw material, waste
Mexico’s government allows foreignowned maquiladoras to import raw materials and machinery tax-free as long as they export the finished products.
While operating under that regime, the companies need to track the raw materials they bring across the border, the finished products they export and where they send their waste, said Roberto Durazo, director of business development for the Mexican company IVEMSA. His firm assists foreign companies and provides “shelter” services, acting as their legal representative in the country.
“All the scrap, the company has to keep very strict controls,” Durazo said. “If they are bringing in metal and they have some metal scrap, they cannot just throw it somewhere.”
In general, the maquiladoras are supposed to export any hazardous waste back to the country of origin, in many cases to the United States. But León Felipe Ruiz González, operations director for the consulting company Consorcio Ambiental, said there are also “legal caveats” that allow for some hazardous waste to be disposed of in Mexico.
He didn’t elaborate on those caveats. However, government records show some companies are disposing of hazardous waste in Mexico.
Documents from the federal Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources list companies that are authorized to handle hazardous waste. In Mexicali, they include 19 companies authorized to transport hazardous waste, four approved recyclers of hazardous waste and 11 companies that store hazardous waste.
The documents show those companies receive things including leadtainted waste from electronics welding, flammable solvents, pesticides, auto waste including lead and acid, corrosive substances, paint, contaminated soil, asbestos, sludge left over from chrome-plating, waste containing cyanide, leadtainted slag from furnaces and other toxic chemicals.
When a company opens a factory in Mexico, it’s required to prepare an environmental study and provide details about the waste it will generate and how it will dispose of the waste.
Durazo’s company has about two dozen maquiladoras as clients, and he said he doesn’t remember any of them having problems with environmental regulations or fines in recent years.
Clouds of chemicals
Behind their walls and guardhouses, some of Mexicali’s factories have tanks that hold industrial chemicals. Leaks and spills have released plumes of hazardous chemicals and sent people fleeing.
One incident occurred in 1992, when a leak at the Química Orgánica pesticide plant in Mexicali released hydrochloric acid into the air, prompting people to flee the area. The plant later closed.
Other incidents at industrial plants in Mexicali have included leaks of am- monia and fires that sent toxic chemicals up in smoke.
The accidents have led to studies of the dangers posed by industrial plants.
Judith Ley García, a researcher at the Autonomous University of Baja California in Mexicali, has studied the risks to help authorities and companies prepare in the event of an emergency.
In one study, Ley and other researchers simulated leaks of ammonia from 18 companies that store substantial amounts of the gas, which, if inhaled, can be fatal.
Mapping danger zones around those plants, they estimated that 14 percent of Mexicali’s population is exposed to risks from potential ammonia leaks, and that’s considering just one of the many toxic chemicals that are used in factories along the border.
A lawsuit and a $21,000 fine
The Grupo Simec steel mill was one of three companies named in a lawsuit in 2014, when law professor Fidel Alfaro Meléndrez and a group of more than 50 university law students sued Mexican environmental authorities and accused them of failing to control pollution.
In their complaint, they wrote that the steel mill and two gas-fired power plants “are polluting the air we breathe, causing harm to the environment and society in general, translating into respiratory illnesses and losses of human lives.”
They lost the case last year. But Alfaro Meléndrez said he’s considering suing again to press for change.
A representative of Grupo Simec didn’t respond to a request for an interview but said in an email that official information about the publicly traded company is available online.
Grupo Simec says it “has made an ongoing commitment to environmental protection and every year we make significant investments to maintain all the equipment in operation at our production plants in good working order.” The company says all its plants comply with environmental regulations.
After the lawsuit was filed, government regulators cracked down. During an inspection in September 2015, officials from the Federal Attorney for Environmental Protection, or PROFEPA, ordered the steel mill temporarily shut down and fined the company 350,000 pesos, or about $21,000, for violations including failing to properly equip the plant to control emissions.
The agency said in a statement that smoke was coming out “through doors, walls and holes, without being captured by any emission-control equipment.”
Just nine months later, the plant caught fire. TV news footage of the blaze in June 2016 showed thick smoke pouring out of the plant. The smoke spread across Mexicali, covering the city.
The steel factory soon reopened. Even when the plant is operating normally, Blanca Ramírez said, smoke drifts through her yard. From her house, she said she sometimes hears what sound like explosions, “like a firecracker inside something.”
Ramírez said she feels powerless. “It’s hard not being able to do anything, not being able to control that problem,” she said. “And I think this doesn’t just affect us. It affects all of Mexicali.”