Peru’s Machu Picchu is one of the world’s most famous tourist sites, welcoming over 1.5 million tourists a year. The unsustainability of its practices also almost got it placed on UNESCO’s List of World Heritage in danger in 2016. Machu Picchu-based biologist Marco Antonio Huamán decided to make some innovative changes to prevent this, turning Machu Picchu into one South America’s leading destinations in sustainable waste management.
The ancient Machu Picchu Pueblo is difficult to reach—there is only one train line for tourists to get to the bucket-list site. This also means that whatever needs to be taken out of the city, in this case the waste produced by hotels and restaurants, is not easy to transport. Vegetable scraps and leftover oil pile up quickly. Transporting this waste to be properly dumped or processed in Cusco or Lima took money and effort, leading many restauranteurs to dump the oil in the nearby Vilcanota River, and placing a financial burden on businesses that had to use their profits to transport the scraps out of the city.
Marco Antonio Huamán is a biologist who works for the Inkaterra Asociación, the non-profit branch of Peru’s eco-hospitality group, Inkaterra. He understood the urgency that the pollution of the river posed: a liter of dumped oil can contaminate up to 1,000 of water. “All this made me think that we should do something to help the population and design a biodiesel machine,” Huamán explained in a BBC interview. He partnered with the AJE Group, a Peruvian beverage company, and the Municipality of the Machu Picchu Pueblo to tackle the problem. They innovated a way to turn the buckets of used oil into biodiesel.
The project was not easy, given that Huamán and his team had to account for things like altitude and the limited ingredients and machinery permitted in the Machu Picchu protected area, but it has been successful. Over 200 hotels and restaurants now recycle their used oil at the plant, and the resulting biodiesel is used to heat the El MaPi Hotel, replacing the diesel fuel it previously used. Additionally, the biodiesel’s resulting glycerin byproduct, which is biodegradable, is used to wash the city’s floors and pavements. “We will not be contaminating anything using glycerin to clean, unlike other chemical-based products. As a fuel for heating, we are keeping particulate and smoke out of the atmosphere,” Huamán explained.
Eventually, he hopes to perfect biodiesel that could power the buses that transport tourists around the city of Machu Picchu. He also hopes to help others throughout Peru, especially high Andean communities, to make their own biodiesel, helping to eliminate waste and providing them with a resource to heat up their homes in a sustainable way.
Photo: Kassandra Laines/Unsplash