A few weeks ago, though, the city closed its giant Bordo Poniente landfill for good, padlocking the gate and trucking the garbage to distant new dumps. Officials have optimistically outlined fast-track strategies to recycle, burn and compost all but a fraction of the garbage that the city now generates. But that European-style vision of handling garbage stands in sharp relief to the needs of the 1,500 trash pickers, or pepenadores, who rely on the refuse at Bordo Poniente every day for their livelihood. “The garbage will never run out,” predicted Mr. Téllez, who is 74, at the start of an hourlong monologue during which he cited Socrates (despite being illiterate himself) and compared himself to Galileo. “We have made great advances, and now others are coming to take the business we have created.” Don Pablo, as all the workers call Mr. Téllez, presides from an office decorated with photographs showing him accompanied by presidents. In the old days, politicians counted on the trash pickers as a base of support. They would help swell campaign crowds, wave flags for visiting dignitaries or even provide pro-government shock troops to attack opposition protests. Presidents no longer come calling. But the pepenadores can still make politicians take notice. Several times last year they blocked the arrival of giant trash trailers at the dump to protest the planned shutdown. In response, when Mayor Marcelo Ebrard of Mexico City turned up on Dec. 19 to close the 975-acre landfill and to announce a project for a power plant fueled by the dump’s methane, he also had to promise that the pepenadores could stay. The city agreed not to close the separation plant where the pepenadores pick through garbage, even though it means the trash must first be delivered to Bordo Poniente, and then reloaded onto trucks to be hauled to the new dumps hours after the pepenadores have finished extracting what they can sell. “Marcelo pledged that we would be working here for 25 years,” Mr. Téllez warned. “He has to fulfill his commitment.” In the gloom of the separation plant, a vast shed, workers sift through garbage moving by on three raised conveyor belts, striking an atonal note with every bottle or can they drop into gaping bags below. Outside, teenagers scrape rust off metal or slice hair and faces off dolls, tossing them into a disconcerting heap of pink vinyl limbs and torsos. Only one-tenth of the garbage they sort through can be set aside for recycling. And for all that effort, each pepenador makes $39 to $62 a week. The work is likely to become harder. “Since they closed Bordo, you can tell there is less garbage,” said César Laguna, 46. “The street sweepers and pickers on the trucks go through it, and it doesn’t get here anymore.” The neighborhood garbage trucks carry their own pepenadores, three or four volunteers who dig through household waste. They make even less than the workers at Bordo Poniente, but at least “we get fewer illnesses working here,” said one of them, Adrián Castellanos. Héctor Castillo Berthier, a sociologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, estimates that a quarter of a million people in Mexico City depend on trash. He ticks them off: street sweepers, garbage collectors, pepenadores, junk dealers and the families they support. “Anything you change is going to alter that tradition,” he said. “There are more and more layers of informality. These are complex processes.” He has no confidence in city officials’ plans to reduce and compost garbage. “They have no Plan A,” let alone a Plan B, Mr. Castillo said. “They are going to bet on a reshuffling of the informal systems.” Indeed, while keeping the separation plant open at Bordo Poniente placates the pepenadores, it makes little economic sense. The 20-ton trailers that collect the garbage from neighborhood trucks must now make a detour to the plant before driving to far-off landfills that the city is paying to take its garbage.
