Contaminated capital reclaims air quality: Mexico City offers model for slashing pollution
Gabriela Escalante stalks the rumbling streets alongside newspaper, peanut and candy vendors, wading deep into traffic at red lights across town.
Her eyes are fixed on tailpipes.
A member of Mexico City's "ecoguarda," or environmental police, she and some 50 colleagues are on the lookout for white clouds of toxic exhaust, stopping hundreds of offending motorists each day, issuing $100 fines and confiscating license plates -- a small but urgent army fighting the capital's infamous air pollution.
"We detect, we detain and we fine," said Escalante, 27. "This is the air we all breathe."
Not long ago, air in this throbbing capital was so bad that cyclists wore surgical masks. Birds fell dead in mid-flight, and children used brown crayons to draw the sky. Ozone exceeded safe levels on 97 percent of days in the year.
But the metropolis ranked the world's most polluted by a 1992 U.N. report has since slashed some of its worst emissions by more than three-quarters and has become a model for improving urban air quality.
Capitals such as Beijing, Cairo, New Delhi and Lima are now more contaminated, according to the World Bank, while air in at least 30 other cities contains more toxic particles, including Barcelona and Prague.
When Latin American leaders met here last month to discuss the environment, many looked to Mexico as an example of progress, said Sergio Jellinek, a World Bank spokesman who attended the forum.
Still, a nagging cloud of ozone has been harder to reduce -- a sign of the secondary air pollution problems that cities can expect even after cutting their most visible contaminants.
With the onset of winter, the worst time of year for pollution, Mexico City has said it plans to spend $3 billion by 2012 to expand public transit and further slash emissions.
"There has been a large improvement, and it's important to show it could be done," said Mario Molina, a Nobel Prize-winning Mexican chemist now advising President-elect Barack Obama's transition team on environmental issues. "But there's still a long way to go to get really satisfactory air."
Ringed by volcanoes and nearly a half-mile higher than Denver, the city's geography and population make it a "perfect factory" for pollution, said Adrian Fernandez, head of the National Institute of Ecology, Mexico's version of the EPA.
In thin air at over 7,300 feet, fuel burns less efficiently, releasing more unused particles. Breathing deeper to fill their lungs, people inhale more toxins.
High-altitude sunshine speeds the chemical reactions that transform emissions into a lethal stew of smog. That brown cloud blankets the city, lowering temperatures cool and trapping pollutants on the ground.
"What you have is a casserole dish with a lid on top," said Armando Retama, a chemist at the city's Environment Department.
Mexico City and its sprawling suburbs swelled from 3 million people in 1950 to more than 20 million today, making it the world's second-biggest urban area after Tokyo. Economic growth kept pace, boosting energy consumption and flooding the roads with more than 4 million vehicles.
Traffic is so clogged that average speeds have dipped to 13 mph, the Environment Department says. Even with today's cleaner cars, experts agree that 70 to 80 percent of emissions are vehicle-related.
The fumes inspired the novelist Carlos Fuentes to rename his toxic capital "Makesicko City" -- and it does make people sick.
Studies show the air irritates the eyes, nose and throat and worsens asthma, allergies, colds, coughs, bronchitis and the flu, while increasing infant deaths and overall mortality. Long-term exposure was found to impair one's sense of smell and to decrease the size and strength of children's lungs.
Mexico has been fighting the haze for decades, passing its first anti-pollution bill in 1971, a year after the U.S. formed the EPA. But enforcement lagged -- until the record smog of the early 1990s.
Learning from Los Angeles' air cleanup, Mexico got to work changing technology and laws. Unleaded gasoline was introduced, catalytic converters were required on new cars, a major refinery was closed and power plants were pushed to switch from oil to natural gas. Factories moved away, decentralizing some of the clog.
The city began emissions tests in 1989 in a landmark program that banned old and failing cars from the road one day a week. Emulated in Beijing, Bogota, Seoul, Santiago, Sao Paulo and elsewhere, Mexico's program now idles at least 320,000 cars a week.
In their first democratic vote for mayor, residents in 1997 elected the green-friendly Democratic Revolution Party, which has since dominated city politics. The capital now vows to slash greenhouse gases 12 percent by 2020 and champions public transit, which accounts for 82.5 percent of trips taken each day.
Data from the city's 36 air-quality monitoring stations show lead levels down 95 percent since 1990, while sulfur dioxide has fallen 86 percent, carbon monoxide 74 percent, and peak ozone levels 57 percent since 1991.
Still, when chemist Retama pulls a filter from an air collector at a rooftop station, the fine screen is covered with a gray film.
"This is what people are breathing into their lungs," he said.
Mexico's federal government still subsidizes gasoline, even as its sagging state oil monopoly delays introducing ultra-low-sulfur fuel. Most trucks and buses are exempt from emissions tests, and a flood of dirty used cars is set to cross the border from the U.S. when NAFTA restrictions expire in January.
Peak ozone levels still exceed the recommended limit on more than half the days in the year.
On the streets, drivers pulled over for polluting often plead poverty, saying they can't afford to fix their cars.
But in a dusty trailer at ecoguarda headquarters, where shelves bulge with 30,000 confiscated license plates, sympathy is short.
"Anyone who has a car should be responsible for keeping it in good condition," said Alejandro Lopez Carrillo, former head of the unit, who himself is banned from driving his over-the-hill 1998 Lincoln on Fridays.
"I want to have a better world, with better air for our families and futures."
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