Rio's Broken Promise to Clean the Water

With the Olympics just a month away, Rio is scrambling to get everything ready for showtime. The country promised cleaner water, but hasn’t delivered. 

When the team bidding to bring the 2016 Summer Games to Rio de Janeiro made their pitch back in 2009, they showed the International Olympic Committee pictures of sailboats on a glassy harbour below a cradle of mountains, and swimmers plunging into turquoise surf off Copacabana Beach.

And they admitted that while the pictures were lovely, the water was rather less so. A couple of hundred years of dumping raw sewage and industrial effluent has destroyed the mangrove system that once filtered the bay, filled the harbour with sludge, killed off most of the dolphins and many other species, and left the water a toxic mess.

But the Olympics, the bidders said – the Olympics, with its sailing and swimming and rowing events – would be the catalyst Rio has needed to finally clean up its water. The Olympic bid promised that by the time of the Games, Rio would have 80 per cent of its sewage treated.

Today, with the Games just a month away? It’s 21 per cent.

There are plans to take some emergency measures for the duration of the Olympics themselves: Barriers are being installed over the biggest canals, to catch larger solid items, and a flotilla of small boats will churn across the bay to scoop up the old couches, stray shoes and plastic bags and bottles that litter its surface. But when the athletes and tourists leave town, residents of Rio are going to be back to living with open sewage in their neighbourhoods, a choking stench around the bay and beaches that threaten serious illness for anyone who hasn’t developed immunities.

So what happened? Why is Rio’s water so foul, and why didn’t it get any better? 

The first problem was with the promise

So says Livia Cunto, who researches Rio’s water for an advocacy organization called Casa Fluminense, and who has an encyclopedic knowledge of both the plethora of actors and the graveyard of failed efforts to fix the pollution.

The basic math is this: The pledge to get to 80 per cent was based on the assumption the city was already at 56 per cent. But the 56 figure came from a national household survey which asked people if they had sewage collection – and most of those who said yes, explains Ms. Cunto, meant that they had a pipe that took the water away when they flushed the toilet. They didn’t mean – or know, or, in many cases, particularly care (we’ll get to that) – whether that water went to a sewage treatment plant or out to a storm drain and right into the sea.

The figure for people whose sewage was actually treated back when the bid was made was 15 per cent. So to get to 80? “That was mad,” Ms. Cunto says. 

But why is the water so bad?

Rio’s water starts in the forests or comes through the Paraiba River system; some of it arrives already tainted with sewage from cities further up the system (lack of sanitation is a national problem). All told, 55 rivers drain into the hydrological basin around Guanabara Bay. And two things pollute it before it hits the sea – industrial effluent and sewage. Rio hosts a busy port, a giant oil-refinery complex and petrochemical and pharmaceutical industries that send runoff containing heavy metals into the bay, says Carla Ramoa Chaves, a geographer who sits on a special commission for Guanabara Bay at the Rio state congress. It is monitored and controlled under environmental legislation, although monitoring budgets (like everything else) have been slashed in Brazil’s economic crisis.

Eloisa Torres, who oversaw public policy for the state sanitation and environmental project for Guanabara Bay for seven years until this past April, says the industrial pollution situation is not great, but a system exists to control and improve it. The sanitation problem, on the other hand, is a mess. Sewage goes from houses into canals, then ditches and storm drains, and into the rivers. “Rio’s rivers are effectively the sewage collection system now,” Ms. Chaves says. Along the way, the waste water picks up trash from all the areas that lack proper waste disposal. Fecal coliform levels in the bay are thousands of times above those registered as safe. 

Why is it so hard to fix?

Rio has had an action plan to fix its sanitation crisis, of one kind or another, underway since 1996, when the Inter-American Development Bank and the Japanese government put up more than 1 billion real ($393-million) to get the city connected to sewage treatment. That plan missed its first deadline, and four extensions, and was finally considered concluded 20 years later. Four sewage treatment plants were built in 20 years; the last of them just recently became operational. Miles of main collection pipes were laid, but the final phase, with the pipes going from the main lines into streets and up to houses, was never done in many places. A total of 800,000 people were connected in the two decades; meanwhile, the city grew and grew (to a total population of 8.7 million now). The Olympic-inspired plan was supposed to make that final step. 

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Taxonomy

• Environment
• Pollution
• Sanitation & Hygiene