So why is plastic pollution so bad in Guatemala?
It’s estimated that 80% of ocean plastic comes from “mismanaged waste” on land. In Guatemala, there’s just one official basurero, or garbage dump, for the entire country. It’s in the nation’s capital of Guatemala City and it’s currently the biggest landfill in all of Central America. Over a third of the country’s total trash ends up in the Guatemala City basurero each year, but not all of it stays there.
During the rainy season, sewage, industrial runoff, and trash from the city’s basurero gets washed into deeps ravines that carry heavily polluted floodwaters to the Rio Motagua - Guatemala’s longest river that runs about 300 miles from the remote central highlands to the Gulf of Honduras in the Caribbean.
The trash that enters the Motagua pours out of the river into the Gulf Of Honduras, where ocean currents deposit it back onto Guatemala’s coast.
To learn more about the ocean plastic crisis in Guatemala and what 4ocean is doing about it, visit the link in our bio.
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