Guanabara Bay has a clean beach for the first time

For the first time since 2016, a beach bathed by Guanabara Bay was considered good. Ribeira beach, located on the quiet island of Paquetá, in the north of Rio de Janeiro, was suitable for swimming throughout the period from April to October this year.

It is a rarity for a region that did not have any of its 25 collection points classified as clean, according to data from Inea (State Institute for the Environment), since when the bathing survey of the Brazilian coast began to be carried out by Sheet🇧🇷

With its 3,530 inhabitants and bicycles, Paquetá populates the center of the bay, about 15 kilometers from the center of the capital, from which it differs. It lives basically on tourism and fishing, despite the poor quality of the sea registered for decades.

Also noteworthy is the beach of Guanabara, on Ilha do Governador, which was regular (up to 75% of the measurements) in an unprecedented way. This has not happened since 2018 in the region, which was left without measurements in 2020, 2021 and in the first three months of 2022 due to the pandemic.

The improvement comes after the sale of Cedae (Companhia Estadual de Águas e Esgotos do Rio de Janeiro) and the concession of sanitation services in 27 cities in Rio de Janeiro to the company Águas do Rio at the end of 2021, following the new regulatory framework for the sector.

The company, which promises to clean up Guanabara Bay in five years, attributes the cleaning of Ribeira beach to an action that stopped the illegal spillage of six Olympic sewage pools per month into the sea.

He also mentions improvements in the treatment station and in the four pumping stations in Paquetá, which help to pump effluents that have difficulty passing through the pipes, as well as reforms and automation of the system in Ilha do Governador.

Geography also helps. Paquetá is located in a deep central channel of the bay, which favors the exchange of water with the sea, diluting the dirt. “There are times when, due to atypical environmental conditions, there is a violent exchange with the oceanic region”, says biologist and activist Mário Moscatelli.

That is why, for the last 20 years, he has been flying over the region at low tide for his Olho Verde project. “Low tide doesn’t lie,” he explains. On two of these overflights, in June and November of this year, he says he saw the sea in Botafogo, usually an open sewer, become crystal clear.

“Almost a historic event”, says the specialist in coastal management. The beach overlooking the Sugar Loaf, at the entrance to Guanabara Bay, was suitable for bathing in two consecutive measurements in July, a rare result in the last 15 years of monitoring, despite still being considered bad.

The main reasons were the lack of rain at the time and the cleaning of the so-called oceanic interceptor, responsible for capturing sewage from a large part of the south zone. More than 600 tons of waste were removed, including two scooters and a toilet.

As a result, the system was able to receive more effluents, which were diverted to the Ipanema submarine outfall —responsible for dumping all this waste on the high seas so that the ocean naturally dilutes it.

“Did it solve the problem? No, it’s just preventing sewage generated inside the rivers from being dumped into the bay, but these rivers are still sewage ditches. The expectation is that they will become rivers again”, hopes Moscatelli.

The concessionaire’s plan is to build an emergency, over the next five years, a belt of sewage collectors around Guanabara Bay “in the same model successfully adopted in Tokyo and Sydney bays”, which will cost R$ 2.7 billion.

Meanwhile, it expects to spend another R$ 10 billion on the implementation of sanitary sewage systems in the eight municipalities bordering the bay by 2033, the term provided for in the contract for the universalization of services.

The quality of the beaches in Rio de Janeiro as a whole remains far below other coastal capitals, but this year there has been an improvement: 14% of the collection points were considered good, a mark higher than the average of 8% registered between 2016 and 2019 (still not counting the pandemic years).

The sum of the bad and terrible stretches of the city, unsuitable for bathing in more than 25% of the measurements, also decreased from 61% to 58% in the same comparison. In addition to the beaches of Paquetá and Ilha do Governador already mentioned, stretches of the south zone contributed to the improvement.

São Conrado, close to the Rocinha favela, was regular after six years as terrible or bad. Praia do Diabo, next to the touristic Pedra do Arpoador, and the portion of Copacabana closer to Leme went from regular last year to good this year.

With regard to the state of Rio de Janeiro, it is more difficult to carry out this analysis because almost a third of the points remain unmonitored, including in Angra dos Reis and Paraty, which reach the third year without knowing the quality of their sea — Inea says it is resuming the measurements gradually.

“I work in the region of Angra and you can see that the same mistakes are being made in the bay of Guanabara in the bay of Ilha Grande, the last of the protected bays. Densely inhabited areas, with low income, with sewage treatment still low”, warns the Moscatelli biologist.

He says he has positive expectations in relation to changes in basic sanitation, but says he is not so optimistic about the other protagonist of the pollution of water bodies: public housing policies and ordering land use.

“Guanabara Bay is the patient who is in the ICU almost dying. He starts to move his toe, his hand, opens his eye, but remains in the ICU”, he illustrates.