Plastic garbage covers Lake Suchitlan in El Salvador

Problems

• Plastic garbage covers Lake Suchitlan in El Salvador

  The name is Suchitlan translates as «place of flowers». But now it is more a place of plastic bottles, tin cans, and green silt. However, the lake is a key source of drinking water in the country. Technically, Suchitlan is protected. Endemic species of fish, water birds, and mammals like cougars and ocelots are supposed to live in and around the lake.
  
  But in fact, it's one of the most polluted bodies of water in Central America.
  Soda bottles, medicine bags, torn flip-flops: all kinds of plastic trash can be found in Lake Suchitlan, a 13,500-hectare lake that serves as a reservoir for a power plant and is a UNESCO Wetland of International Importance. Local fishermen say pollution is forcing tilapia and cichlids to dive deeper into the man-made lake -- the country's largest freshwater reservoir -- where they cannot be reached by fishing nets. Ducks are clearing paths through trash, small turtles are climbing on floating bottles to sunbathe, and skinny horses are making their way into the lake to drink the polluted water.
  
  This pollution is unprecedented, says Jacinto Tobar, mayor of Photonics, a small village 100 kilometers north of San Salvador in the department of Chalatenango. With a population of 2,500, Potonico was the most affected of the 15 coastal villages.
  Authorities promised to clean up the reservoir. To do this, the state agency that manages the reservoir hired dozens of workers to manually clean the lake.  However, after a while, the budget for this project was cut, and the work stopped. Local volunteers also did what they could to clean the reservoir. Women moved around in rickety boats and worked from dawn to dusk to get rid of the waste that filled the lake.
  Trash enters the lake from the Lempa River, which flows from the highlands of Guatemala through neighboring Honduras. It settles at the foot of El Salvador's largest hydroelectric plant. Some of the garbage enters the Lempa through its tributary, the Aceluate, which flows through the Salvadorian capital.
  Environmental activists say the problem must be solved at its source. «We have to attack the place where the main flow of garbage comes from,» said Eduardo Argueta, 29, an architecture student at the University of El Salvador, who has launched several cleanup campaigns. He suggests fencing it in strategic locations to contain plastic waste and prevent it from flowing into rivers and lakes. 
  One-fifth of all waste in El Salvador is not properly recycled. This means that about 845 tons of trash are in rivers and lakes daily.
  Ricardo Navarro, president of the Center for Appropriate Technology, says only 30 percent of the waste floats; the rest sinks to the bottom of bodies of water. This means that only the tip of the iceberg is visible.
  El Salvador is one of the poorest countries in Latin America. Meanwhile, the country's president Nayib Bukele has mainly focused on the fight against crime and the controversial volcano energy bitcoin project. Thus, by the end of 2022, the problem of cleaning the Suchitlan Reservoir is still not solved.