San Pedro La Laguna, a small mostly indigenous village in southwestern Guatemala, set the example. The lagoon is Lake Atitlan; the village grew on its shores and is now inhabited by between 11,000 and 14,000 people, mostly Tzutujil Mayan descendants
Although it is so small, San Pedro appears in the main tourist guides of the planet. It is now a town almost free of single-use plastic: bags, straws, foam containers, cups, utensils. Its mayor, Mauricio Méndez, took the measure, in order to protect the lake: the town landfill was already saturated with plastic, much of which reached its waters. The ban came into effect in October 2016.
Tortillas are currently served in banana leaves (maxan) – as in the past – or in cloth. People go shopping with baskets, napkins or aprons, as one neighbor, Dolores Puac, told Global Press Journal’s Brenda Leticia Saloj Chiyal.
Mayor Méndez told UN Environment that “80 per cent of our town’s inhabitants have stopped using plastics. That for us is a real success.”
However, according to an article by Ozy, signed by Sebastián Escalón, not everyone can replace plastic with biodegradable materials. A shaved ice vendor named María Andrea told Escalón that she uses paper cups for large portions of the product, but she still uses plastic cups for small portions, because they’re twice as cheap and she can’t afford paper cups for all of the merchandise. “I would like to stop using foam glasses, but I can’t. If I increase the price of the shaved ice, kids will stop buying it.”
San Pedro La Laguna was not the first to ban single-use plastic in Guatemala, but it set the trend. In 2015, the municipality of Cantel, Quetzaltenango, also in the southwest of the country, did it first, but the ban did not enter into force “because it was not published in the official gazette,” according to Prensa Libre.
The regulations have been replicated ever since in several other towns. Along the two years, at least 15 Guatemalan municipalities have banned the use of single-use plastic. According to Diario de Centro América’s Patricia González, San Pedro La Laguna and Cantel were followed by San Andrés Semetabaj, San Juan La Laguna and Santa Lucía Utatlán, in Sololá (the same region of San Pedro La Laguna); Acatenango, Chimaltenango; San Miguel Chicaj, Baja Verapaz; San Miguel Petapa and San Juan Sacatepéquez, Guatemala; Antigua Guatemala, Sacatepéquez; San Pedro Sacatepéquez, San Marcos; San Juan Ixcoy, Huehuetenango; San Juan Chamelco and San Cristóbal Verapaz, Alta Verapaz.
Last February 10th , Antigua, the colonial city of Guatemala, joined the list.
These regulations impose fines for those who fail to comply, especially for merchants. The fines in San Pedro La Laguna are among the highest: they can reach up to US$2,000 (15,000 quetzales) for people who sell goods in foam containers or plastic bags, according to UN Environment.
According to Ozy’s Sebastián Escalón, these measures stem from the communities’ own need to preserve their environment.
For its part, the Guatemalan Plastics Commission, with the major producers of plastic in the country, petitioned the Constitutional Court of Guatemala a protection f against these regulations, with the argument that it is “the misuse of plastics and not plastics themselves that causes environmental damages,”Sebastián Escalón writes. The Constitutional Court ruled in favor of San Pedro La Laguna, “but the [plastic] commission is still exploring strategies to stop the spread of plastic bans across Guatemala.”
The president of the Plastics Commission, Rolando Paiz, told the journalist that the bans put at stake “thousands of jobs,” and that “plastics constitutie only 8% of Guatemala’s waste and “only a quarter of that comes from single-use plastics.
On the other hand, Paíz told El Periódico’s Ana Lucía González that, only 25 percent of the 2,000 tons of plastic bottles produced monthly are recycled, because not enough material reaches the recycling plants.
For their part, environmentalists insist that real change begins with use. Every day in Guatemala, reports the same El Periódico article, one only person generates and contributes an average of 0.51 kilograms of plastic to the garbage dumps. These are figures from that Guatemala’s Environment ministry.
Around the world, according to the United Nations, 13 million tons of plastic are dumped into the ocean each year. The marine fauna already eats the plastic microfibers that accumulate in the sea beds. On Environment Day last year, the United Nations Environment Program for Latin America and the Caribbean reminded the horrifying figures: only 9% of the nine billion tons of plastic produced in the world since 1950 has been recycled; five trillion plastic bags are used every year on the planet and one million plastic bottles are bought every minute one million.
“If this trend continues, by 2050 we will have about 12 billion tons of plastic waste in landfills and in nature.”