BEAUTIFUL AND BROKEN
Rio is a stunner. Tom Jobim, the city’s eternal poet, sang this beauty in his “Samba do Avião”: Cristo’s arms open wide over Guanabara Bay, sheer boulders dropping into the sea, Copacabana hemmed in white. “Este samba é só porque, Rio eu gosto de você . . .”
Cariocas are proud of their cidade maravilhosa. Beachgoers in Ipanema clap every summer afternoon as the sun sets behind the Dois Irmãos peaks, grateful for another day in their Marvelous City. The natural setting is also Rio’s biggest selling point: the 2016 Olympic bid videos lingered on it, and the United Nations declared the city’s landscape a World Heritage Site.
But the truth is that up close, Rio stinks.
Zoom in on the postcard and you will see trash clotting the waterfront and sewage percolating from broken pipes, blooming into fetid puddles on the sidewalks. Centuries of ill treatment have devastated much of this landscape: lakes curdle with dead fish when pollution brings down oxygen levels, and the waves that lap the shore are often too tainted with fecal bacteria for swimming. Stretches of marshland and Atlantic rain forest are being cleared for new development with little regard for ecosystems, and hours-long traffic jams cast an acrid haze over the horizon.
That week in the mountains confronted me with one of Rio de Janeiro’s greatest paradoxes: the environment that made this city and this state exceptional has been abused to an extreme.
In the Serra dos Órgãos, I’d seen the horrific consequence of clear-cutting forest on slopes and riverbeds. In that case, the cost of environmental neglect was measured in lives. As a journalist, I went back to work after the mudslides with new questions. What were the effects of negligence in other areas? What were its costs, and who was made to bear them?
If there ever was a moment to turn this around, it was in these years before the Olympics. The city’s bid had included promises to clean up the bay and plant 24 million trees. There were also new laws, such as a 2010 federal measure that required the elimination of unregulated dumps in four years.
I also hoped this moment would go beyond the old para inglês ver—efforts made for the sake of foreign eyes—and would awaken greater awareness among Cariocas of the long-term consequences of continuing to disregard their greatest gift. My concerns weren’t only journalistic. I had come back to reclaim Rio and find my place in it. A year into my stay, I felt its crenellated mountains and scalloped beaches were as much a part of me as the sounds of Portuguese and the nationality named on my passport. They were my home and my heritage, too.
I started by looking at Rio’s trash—my own trash.
Surveys told me that much of it, just like most of Brazil’s garbage, ended up in unregulated, open-air dumps. This included my own waste, which wasn’t separated out in recyclables and compost, as it had been in San Francisco, but all went into the same plastic bag and down my building’s chute. That was the last I saw of it. So, I wondered, what happened to that bag?
It wasn’t hard to trace. My waste and that of Greater Rio’s 13 million people all went to one place: Gramacho, a mountain of garbage so vast it weighed over 60 million tons and covered an area the size of 262 football fields.
Its scale was overwhelming. I went with Rodrigues, the driver, and the AP video and photo crew. As we approached, the taxi joined a line of eighteen-wheelers that rumbled outside the front gates, waiting their turn. I watched as each truck was allowed in and started to climb a steep mountain. The flank that faced the entrance had been layered again and again with clay, creating a smooth dome zigzagged with roads. Underneath, there were decades’ worth of trash. Crawling up its slope in single file, trucks that stood nearly thirteen feet tall looked like a parade of children’s toys. This was where my garbage ended up—somewhere on this monumental mound.
The real work took place on the other side, where Gramacho faced Guanabara Bay. There the waste was uncovered and slouched in rolling heaps toward the water. I stepped outside the cab and tried to find my footing among the slippery, uneven jumble. The rancid smell clogged up my nose and mouth as if it were some thick, gummy substance that would choke me if I sucked in too much at once. Fat black flies dive-bombed like tiny twin-engine planes, the hum of their wings making my skin crawl even before I felt their touch.
Trucks climbed up and onto the piles, sending well-fed vultures hop-flying to safety, then poured out their loads. Men and women reached into the cascade and whisked away what they could, working fast, trying to beat the other hands grabbing into the same stream. Once the trucks backed away, the trash pickers bent over what remained, combing through it for any valuables they might have missed. The vultures circled, impatient, then swooped back in for the scraps of food.
Guanabara Bay spread from the foot of the mound like a dark, oily stain. Cristo, serene and blind, kept watch from across the water.
Gramacho was one of the continent’s largest dumps, and jutted out of the western shore of the bay like a rotten tooth. The landfill had operated for much of my life, springing up on the marshy shore sometime in the late 1970s. For most of that time, it ran with little oversight, contaminating the air, ground, and water around it. At its busiest, it never closed; around 900 trucks disgorged 9,000 tons of trash onto it every day.
The toxic juice produced by its fermenting organic matter had flowed into the bay and seared all vegetation it touched, opening a ring of devastation. The methane gas it exuded had polluted the atmosphere and created the danger of occasional explosions. The heap even posed a risk for the airplanes heading to the international airport less than three miles away: the resident vultures collided with airplanes 286 times between 2008 and 2011.
The situation was no different for most cities in the state. In 2010, only 10 percent of the 20,000 or so daily tons of garbage produced by Rio state went to planned waste management sites. The rest went into open-air heaps. The 1 percent of refuse that was recycled was culled by catadores, the men and women who sifted through the waste in search of material to sell.
In Gramacho, they made up a ragged army of five thousand. On that February day in 2011, I found them in an uproar. After decades of anonymity, the catadores and the landfill itself had been propelled into something like fame.
It started when a Brazilian artist, Vik Muniz, visited back in 2007. Muniz worked with unusual materials like dust, diamonds, or sugar, and often wove social issues into the work. From his connection to the workers came a three-year project that incorporated their particular skills and the materials they rescued from Gramacho.
Muniz had photographed them in poses drawn from classic works of art: Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat, or Pablo Picasso’s Woman Ironing. Then he’d blown up the image until it was large enough to fill the footprint of a warehouse nearby. Recyclables sorted into colors were used to fill in the image, composing a mosaic of what had once been trash. These monumental portraits were then photographed from above.
The work had changed Gramacho. Before this, some of the catadores had never seen a photo of themselves. Seeing their own image built out of the garbage that both stigmatized and fed their families was transformative. It also materially improved their circumstances. Money from the art sales had returned to the community, and they’d built a sorting center to make their jobs easier, with a kitchen and a place to rest.
A documentary, Waste Land, had recorded this process, and it was up for an Oscar. The award ceremony would happen the week after my visit; if the documentary won, the people of Gramacho might see their own faces flash on the television screen, bringing them into Hollywood’s grandest party, even if remotely. Expectations in Gramacho had never been higher, and the life of the catadores had never been better.
Amid all this came other news: Gramacho would be closed down.
In spite of recent improvements, such as the clay layers that made the mound impermeable, and a system to capture the toxic liquid that had long leached into the bay, shutting down Gramacho was key because of what it represented, with its hordes of trash sorters, its size, and the degradation it wrought on its surroundings. A licensed landfill was already under construction in Seropédica, a town forty miles away.
Environmentally, it was the only way to go. The move was expected to reduce carbonic gas emissions by 1.9 million tons per year, according to the city government. As I picked my way through the waste, I looked for someone who could tell me what this would mean for the catadores.
One young woman stayed away from the scrum. She wore hot pink leggings under a mesh of torn fishnet tights, with short denim cutoff shorts on top and knee-high galoshes. Black tights covered her arms as protection from the waste and the sun; a T-shirt tied over her head draped down her back. She surveyed the scene with a keen eye, a hand on thrust-out hip, a heaping bag full of something by her side. Amid the ruin of Gramacho, she’d managed a postapocalyptic glamour, and her defiance in face of degradation around set her apart.
Twenty-one-year-old Sueleide da Silva had learned the trade from her mother, who worked the piles of refuse for twenty-five years until she lost her eyesight to an infection contracted from trash falling from a truck. Sueleide had her first child by the time she was fourteen; by fifteen she was pregnant again, working at the dump alongside three of her sisters. None of them attended school beyond the fourth grade, but together they supported their own children and their mother.
She had never known a life away from Gramacho. Her skills were honed to its particular demands. During the day, she explained, the catadores worked with their eyes, trained to spot the shine of glass and metals. But deliveries ramped up at night, so children learned from their parents how to differentiate materials by touch and sound, telling apart the fourteen types of recyclable plastic and the various grades of paper.
Most of the catadores lived in lean-tos of plywood, tin, and cardboard that had sprung up a short walk from the dump. They didn’t earn much: cardboard went for 10 cents a kilo; printer paper for 13 cents if clean, 11 cents if dirty. Glass, heavy and hard to handle, fetched 14 cents. Sueleide’s specialty was printer paper. The load was lighter, and on a good day she took home $40. It was a decent living; Brazilian minimum wage was less than $300 a month.
There had been talk of the dump’s closure for years, but it was always just that—rumors. Back in 1996, there had been some big changes. Authorities put an end to child labor and registered the catadores. Rules restricted Gramacho to taking in only household trash; industrial and hospital waste were diverted to more appropriate sites.
Now the bosses said the closure was certain. Sueleide was skeptical. Improvements, sure, but to close Gramacho? It was a world unto itself and had offered up the soda bottles, cardboard boxes, and old magazines that, cleaned and categorized, had fed three generations of her family. She could not imagine a day when the teeming heap of possibility would no longer exist.
The people of Gramacho, a gente de Gramacho, were afraid, Sueleide said. The state-of-the-art landfill in Seropédica had no room for catadores.
There were provisions made for the workers. Wells were being drilled into the mound. Gases generated by decomposition were expected to generate energy and raise about $360 million over fifteen years. A portion of this would go to the workers, in addition to a lump-sum payment of $7,500. Job training was offered to the catadores. But Sueleide kept her expectations low, perhaps out of the abundance of hard knocks her short lifetime had delivered.
One single stroke of bad luck won’t land someone in Gramacho. Motioning at the others, and perhaps thinking of her own family, she ticked off the problems: disease, domestic abuse, drug addiction, illiteracy, unplanned pregnancies . . . Her voice trailed off. Six months of job training won’t solve any of these, she said.
“You don’t end up in Gramacho because you have options,” she said. “Most people here can’t read properly, and every job out there, they want you to have high school, college. You have people here who don’t know what to do with a pencil.”
Places like Gramacho are reminders of the complex ways history, culture, and the economy have interacted with landscape to shape Rio. Closing down the landfill was essential to restore the marshes around it and clean up the bay, but the closure would bring difficulties far beyond replanting mangroves and restoring the crab count. I had gone hoping for a feel-good story about Rio on the mend, but left with Sueleide in mind.
The documentary about Gramacho and the artist didn’t win the Oscar. There would be no clear-cut victories there, no neat, happy endings.
The landfill was shut down in June 2012, less than a year after my visit. The job training was a flop, as Sueleide had predicted: most of courses required high school degrees, and the average catador had four years of schooling. Nearly half of them couldn’t read or write, as she had pointed out.
Then the state environment secretary signed a big contract to set up a recycling center. This could work, I thought; the people of Gramacho could put their knowledge to use. I went back to look for Sueleide and her kids in the shacks near the dump, to see how they were faring. She was gone. No one knew where she’d moved, what she was doing now. She’d disappeared into the city.
When I returned two years later to visit the recovering marshland around Gramacho, a biologist pointed out the hovering buzzards a stone’s throw from the dusty main road.
“Another dump,” he said, explaining that illegal trash deposits often spring up in a neighborhood after one is shut down. “You can always tell because of the vultures.”
Even as patches went up in one spot, the problems reemerged elsewhere. Hard as it was to close the dump, it was harder to change attitudes.
How could a population of beachgoers who are so proud of their city coexist with the degradation of the very landscape that defined them? The answer lay, in part, in the Carioca approach to life, this elusive Rio Zen. They lived with an intense focus on the moment, on what was close by and immediate. They cared intensely about their homes, their friends and family, the good times to be had right here and now. But try to nail a Carioca down with plans for the weekend and you’d find the future is nebulous, whether it is tomorrow, next year, or the next generation.
The same nearsightedness applies to public spaces; they are too distant from the individual to register as worthy of concern or protection. What belongs to everyone belongs to no one, and so construction waste is dumped on the marshes, coconut husks are left on the sand when their sweet water is gone, and candy wrappers flutter from the hand to the street, into sewers and into the ocean . . . away.
Although there are laws that forbid littering, anyone who has ever spent New Year’s Eve in Copacabana Beach and watched the sun rise over sand fouled with beer cans, sandwich wrappers, and empty wine bottles knows this is widely disregarded. Every January 1, a legion of sweepers in bright orange uniforms gathers up to four hundred tons of trash from Copacabana’s sand.
It took an education campaign in 2013, enforced by inspectors with the power to impose hefty fines on the spot, to make a dent in the Carioca’s littering habit. Under the new rules, flick a cigarette butt on the ground and it could cost you $75; toss a beer can and it could rack up a $200 fine. Throw an old couch or a useless TV into the bay and the fine would be over $400. This approach showed immediate results: within the first month, the waste management company reported downtown’s streets were 50 percent cleaner. It seems the fine made littering an immediate, personal concern, bringing the consequences close enough to snap Cariocas to attention. Only time would tell whether this law would sink in and become a habit and a value.
I had moved to Rio knowing that litter and waste management were serious problems. But there was another environmental issue that caught me off guard: air pollution. During the still, dry days of winter when rain eluded the city, a brown sock of smog lay over the horizon, smudging the thin blue line between sky and ocean.
The recipe for Rio’s pollution is particular to the place. The same topography that makes the city so pretty also makes it impossible to lay down a straight road. Traffic is forced to travel along winding ribbons of asphalt that loop around lakes and squeeze through tunnels. Add to this a car fleet that tripled in twenty years, with no significant investment in roadways, and you’ve got an idling, honking mess that pours its dirty fumes into the city daily. A survey by TomTom, the GPS manufacturer, found that Rio has the third-worst traffic in the world, behind only Moscow and Istanbul. Indeed, the state’s environmental agency blames 77 percent of air pollution on cars and buses.
This also means the city lauded by the UN for the quality of its outdoor life has some of the worst air in Brazil. When a World Health Organization report compared local measures of airborne particulate matter in 2011 they found Rio’s count was three times above recommended levels.
Rio’s problem is also Brazil’s problem. Traffic is a growing problem nationally, adding to the damage done by polluting industries such as steelworks.
The grime in the air became apparent once I had settled into my apartment. A day or two after I had mopped them, the wood floors were already covered in a slick black layer made up of the oily exhaust that wafted from buses mixed with marine spray from the ocean half a block away. Wiping this stuff up made me wonder about the inside of my lungs.
Indeed, over the next year I went from being a healthy, once-a-season-cold type to a chronic sniffler who suffered from sore throats, sinus infections, and other respiratory problems every other week. I imagined the balloonlike alveoli in my lungs as petri dishes at the hands of some mad scientist who mixed in rubber particles from tires, soot from burned oil, and fungal spores. By this time, my furniture and clothes had arrived, and had fallen prey to one of the huge drawbacks of tropical seaside living: humidity and mold. My leather shoes, belts, and purses were soon covered in a fuzzy white layer. Useless wool jackets developed fungal bloom patterns, rhizoids grew through the spices in their jars, and the tea clumped into toxic balls.
As the months wore on, I found myself defeated by the microscopic particles that embedded themselves in the fabric of my couch and in my lungs. I resisted leaving the apartment I’d struggled so hard to find; finding another would be hard, and there would be a hefty fine for breaking the mandatory thirty-month contract. But by the time I sneezed blood all over my computer while sitting at the front row of a press conference with the International Olympic Committee I decided it was time to leave my almost-on-the-beach place with its exorbitant rent, its mildew, and its bus fumes and find something easier on my lungs and my pocket.
I settled in Flamengo, a residential area facing Guanabara Bay. While Ipanema had represented a certain image of Rio that I’d craved, it was this neighborhood that had served as my parents’ first foothold in the city. Its streets were lined with stately old trees and Art Deco buildings that offered soaring ceilings and a distant view of Cristo. The beach was too polluted for swimming, but that also meant cheaper rent. I fell for its muted rhythms and the elderly ladies in strings of pearls who walked their key-chain-sized dogs in the early morning.
Plus, my new apartment faced the Morro da Viúva, or Widow’s Hill, a glorious granite dome that was enclosed by buildings on all sides but luxuriantly forested on top. Anywhere else, it would be crisscrossed with hiking trails, but in Rio it was little known outside the neighborhood and seemed diminutive compared to the twin humps of the Sugarloaf just across the bay. But thanks to its crown of trees, I finally had a picture window with a view onto swaying palms, the occasional troop of monkeys and chattering flocks of parrots.
A jog and swim at Ipanema Beach was no longer just steps away, but this neighborhood has its own waterfront park, the Aterro do Flamengo, a greenbelt that stretches from the downtown airport of Santos Dumont, along Flamengo Beach, to the small sheltered cove at Botafogo.I
The first time I ventured alone into the Aterro after my move, the syrupy musk of the cannonball tree’s cream-and-crimson flowers brought back one of those dormant memories that lie buried for years. I remembered myself as a toddler under these same trees, contemplating the fleshy-petaled flower that filled my hands, and the moment when I dug into its stem-filled heart and tore it apart. The smell lingered on my fingertips, a reminder of the shame that had filled me after that first conscious act of destruction. Decades later, the honeyed scent under the trees brought back that afternoon, the pang of guilt. It also closed a loop—there was something of myself in this city after all.
My jogging route went into the park, past the cannonball trees with their extravagant flowers, to the bay’s shore, where I’d stretch and look out at the granite monolith of the Sugarloaf rising across the water, just beyond Botafogo Bay with its little slip of beach and its scores of bobbing sailboats and fishing vessels. To the left was the long stretch of white that was Flamengo Beach. At my back, Cristo soared above the high-rises.
When traveling along South America’s shore on board the Beagle, Charles Darwin stopped in Rio de Janeiro. It was late fall in 1832. The ship had turned into Guanabara, and anchored right there, within the shelter of Botafogo. Nearby he found “a most delightful house,” and stayed for two months, walking the sand, collecting specimens, going for long horseback rides, and making notes that exclaimed on the exuberant fauna and flora.
It was after such a ride on June 1, 1832, that, particularly taken with what he saw, he wrote in the diary: “I do not know what epithet such scenery deserves: beautiful is too tame. Every form, every colour is such a complete exaggeration of what one has ever beheld before.”
Reading this, I thought he might have stopped where I did during my run, and looked over the water to see the oblique afternoon sun striking gold out of the Sugarloaf’s grayish pink rock, and felt lifted by the sight, much as I did.
And yet, it was at that point that the stench of sewage became overpowering. The water in Botafogo cove, where Darwin had collected coral, was now so contaminated it had not been deemed safe for bathing in decades. Give in to temptation on a hot day—a few brave souls did—and you’d risk fungal growth on your skin, a bout of hepatitis, or the stomach cramps and diarrhea that come with an E. coli infection. The state environmental agency found the water along Flamengo Beach too polluted for human contact in about four of five tests. The Carioca River, which empties into the bay right by Flamengo Beach, runs gray and dead with sewage.
For all of the environmental devastation I’d seen in Rio, no aspect seemed more incongruous than this rampant abuse of its waterways. That spot by the bay, with its quintessentially Carioca view and its stink, became a daily prompt: Rio, beautiful and rotten.
I. The Aterro do Flamengo’s origins were also wrapped in a great story. Its construction was coordinated by Lota de Macedo Soares, a daughter of the Brazilian elite and self-taught modernist who administered the park’s development while carrying on a dramatic affair with the poet Elizabeth Bishop over sixteen years. Lota dreamed up much of what makes this park unique, such as the light posts that soar 150 feet high and cast a glow like moonlight.