Pollution in Brazil

The silvery Tietê

A Brazilian radio programme broadcast in 1990, “The Meeting of the Rivers”, compared the condition of London’s River Thames with São Paulo’s Tietê. The Thames had been reborn, starting from Joseph Bazalgette, a Victorian engineer, who began to build sewers that diverted the filth downstream. The Tietê was choking in waste from 33,000 factories and sewage from 13m people, more than four filths of it untreated. The river was biologically dead as far as Barra Bonita, 260 km downstream from São Paulo city.

The show struck a chord. Newspapers and NOGS joined the campaign to clean up the river. A petition attracted 1.2m signatures. Finally, in 1992, Projeto Tietê was launched.

Unlike many other infrastrucuture projects in Brazil, this one kept going through hyperinflation, financial crises and changing political leaders. Cheap loans helped the biggest industrial polluters to become cleaner. New water-treatment plants were built and sewage pipes laid.

Twenty years later, the Tietê is still stinking and filthy as it flows darkly through São Paulo. But not for much longer. Today 55% of the city’s sewage is treated; by 2018, 85% should be. The state governor, Geraldo Alckmin, is trying to get the 35 municipalities in the Tietê basin to co-operate: until 2010 Guarulhos, a satellite city of 1.2m people, treated not a drop of its sewage.

São Paulo’s pollution now reaches only as far as Salto, 100 km downstream. By 2018, says Monica Porto, a water-quality expert at the University of São Paulo, the benefits should be visible – and sniffable – in the city itself.

Paulistanos used to love their river, says Janes Jorge, whose book, “The River the City Lost”, tells its history. Artists painted it; swimmers and rowers raced on it; families had days out on its islands and banks. Sorting out the city’s sewage is just a start, Mr Jorge says: much of what sullies the Tietê is rubbish thrown on the street and dust and oil from cars. “The river’s problems are an expression of the city’s problems – of poverty and environmental degradation.” Its clean-up may show that all this is slowly being overcome.

(adapted from: The Economist – October 22ⁿᵈ-28ᵗʰ, 2011)