The period around New Year is the great unifying time in Rio
de Janeiro, and the beach is the great unifying place, more than any other in
both cases. Everyone is on the beach at midnight as the New Year begins, and
everyone is equal on the sand, in the sea and under the fireworks. All types of
people are there mixed together, from the rich Zona Sul types of European and
Mediterranean ancestry to the poorer people of the Zona Norte and favela
communities, often of African and indigenous blood, all colours and all
backgrounds are united by one thing – they all leave their litter on the beach.
Copacabana
Beach on 1 January apparently has the largest single regular clean-up
operation on the planet, and this would be no surprise to anyone who has spent
that night, or a Saturday or Sunday afternoon at the beach in Rio. The sand is
almost covered in rubbish with New Year champagne bottles embellishing the
general waste of crisp and cigarette packets, flyers, beer and soft drink cans,
plastic bottles and bags galore. At the end of a regular afternoon you can find
all these things and even occasional used tampons and nappies if you are lucky.
The justification that it keeps somebody in job, heard regularly from people
across the economic spectrum, just doesn’t wash. People get paid to clean the
streets and your car, but throwing your litter around in them doesn’t make any
more sense there either. Perhaps the poorer people don’t know any better and
the richer people don’t take their maids to the beach to clean up after them, I
don’t know, but generally if you see people taking their litter away with them
from Ipanema Beach, they are almost guaranteed to be gringoes. Not always
though, because only today a Brazilian mother and daughter were filling up
carrier bags between them with other peoples’ litter, three bags full between
them and they’d hardly left their canga.
This is not the behaviour of the average middle class carioca
though, the only people you find collecting litter on the beach usually are the
cata lata people. It has long been my
feeling that those who collect your aluminium cans from the beach are generally
the most respectful, courteous people in the whole of Rio. It feels like almost
the only ones sometimes. Having watched the wonderful Waste Lands film about the project of
artist Vik Muniz in Jardim Gramacho, I had to expand this feeling to include
people who collect litter all around the city.
Jardim Gramacho was the city dump on the edge of Guanabara Bay in the
Zona Norte, the largest waste facility in South America and possibly even the
world until it closed in 2012. No surprise that Porcaria de Janeiro produces so
much waste with the uncaring attitude of most residents to leaving litter in
beautiful places and recycling none of it. Even the children’s games and the
religious ceremonies of Rio leave litter everywhere. Kids leaving broken kites
on every street, while the macumba rituals leave the beaches full of candles,
bottles, plastic cups and containers full of food for the rats and pigeons to
enjoy.
Hopefully, if and when Tiao and Zumbi from Jardim Gramacho
enter into the political world of Rio and possibly even the Zumbi Nation of
Brazil, they might help to change those attitudes a little. I won’t spoil the
film for anybody but it is as uplifting as it should be depressing, and another
of Brazil’s Great Films of the past decade or so.
In the meantime, the beaches fill with litter which blows
into the sea, the turtles
and rays are poisoned by it, the drains block with it and cause all kinds
of storm chaos, flooding and maybe even contribute to the landslides that are
becoming a regular feature of life around the state. A little more education
(especially for the educated cariocas) and lot more recycling facilities would
help. Rio is expecting a whole load of visitors from abroad in the coming years,
and if the proud cariocas want to show the best side to their city and their
state, then the first thing that they should do is to stop visiting those
beautiful beaches and leaving them looking so ugly. A small step to help turn
Porcaria de Janeiro back into the marvellous city that it once was.
