The city of Guaxupé, a well-known coffee-production center in southeastern Brazil’s Minas Gerais state, has begun building a reputation for solid-waste recycling. Under an eight-week pilot project conducted in 13 neighborhoods of the city in May and June, weekly collection volumes increased 3.5-fold for a range of recyclables including plastic, glass, paper and metal. At the conclusion of the pilot, organizers began extending the initiative to cover the entire city. The voluntary program, called Separate +, or Separa + in Portuguese, aimed to dramatically boost recycling rates. It was overseen by Delterra, an environmental nonprofit with offices in Indonesia, Argentina and Brazil. Three local partners took part: the Guaxupé municipal government; a São Paulo-based environmental nonprofit called the Recycling Institute; and Guaxupé Recycle, a 21-employee local recycling cooperative. Organizers chose Guaxupé as the venue because it is one of 14 municipalities in the Recycling Institute’s...
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Cleared and heavily degraded tropical and subtropical forestland whose collective area equals Mexico’s could be made to regenerate naturally, offering a low-cost, environmentally friendly way to combat climate change and reduce biodiversity loss, a recent study says. The study, published in October in the journal Nature, was conducted by scientists from Brazil, Australia, Canada, and the United States. The researchers identified 215 million hectares (2.15 million sq. kms or 830,120 sq. miles) of former tropical and subtropical forest worldwide—much of it having been cleared for ranching and agriculture—as suitable for natural regrowth. The interventions needed to promote this regrowth would be relatively simple—for instance, installing firebreaks and fencing to ensure that grassland fires and cattle, respectively, will not enter forest-regeneration areas. Five countries—Brazil, Indonesia, China, Mexico and Colombia—account for 52% of the land where scientists believe natural regeneration could occur. Brazil has the...
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Debate has raged for more than a decade over Dominga, a highly controversial, US$2.5 billion project that calls for an open-pit copper and iron-ore mine, a processing plant, and a dedicated seaport near northern Chile’s Humboldt Penguin National Reserve. This month legal battling over Dominga entered a new phase, when the Antofagasta Environmental Court granted a motion sought by Andes Iron, the Chilean company pursuing the project, to reverse the government of President Gabriel Boric’s rejection of the plan in January 2023. In its ruling, issued on Dec. 9, the court ordered the national government’s six-member Ministers Committee in charge of environment-impact review to issue a new resolution addressing the matter within 15 days, presumably one that would reflect the court’s position. But the Boric administration has taken a different approach: On Dec. 23, it appealed the matter to Chile’s Supreme Court in a bid...
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Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum wants G20 nations to divert 1% of their total military budget to mass reforestation. “Stop sowing the seeds of war, and instead plant peace and life,” said Sheinbaum on Oct. 18, during a G20 meeting in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. “The proposal is to establish a fund to allocate 1% of military spending by our countries to carry out the biggest reforestation program in history.” Added Sheinbaum: “It would mean freeing up US$24 billion per year to support six million tree planters who could reforest 15 million hectares, an area about five times the size of Denmark or the whole of Guatemala, Belize and El Salvador put together.” Sheinbaum, Mexico’s first female president and previously author of portions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment Report, said the measure would help mitigate global warming and restore social fabric. She said this would help...
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