The coordinator of the Civil Defense of Itaquaquecetuba (Greater SP) started walking through a thicket, on the banks of the Jaguari stream, looking for the source of the unmistakable smell of ammonia. It didn’t take long to find a PVC pipe from which a dark liquid was flowing directly into the watercourse.
“It’s from aluminum sludge”, said Anderson Marchiori dos Santos Silva, the coordinator. “The sludge, in contact with the water, produces ammonia”, he explained, about the track to find offenders.
The act carried out by employees of Itaquaquecetuba, accompanied by the Sheet at the end of November, is an example of a problem faced by municipalities in the metropolitan region with aluminum recycling companies suspected of contaminating rivers and groundwater.
At least six companies have been caught in irregularities since 2021. Half of them are the subject of investigations by the Civil Police or the Public Prosecutor’s Office on suspicion of irregular disposal of products in waterways and were monitored at the request of the Public Prosecutor’s Office.
The suspicions involve businessmen known in the sector as “sludge washers”, hired by the aluminum recycling industry itself to try to recover the remaining metal in the by-product resulting from the scrap casting process, the “black sludge” or “saline sludge”.
“It is a serious problem. There is a concentration of these companies there in the region of Suzano, Itaquaquecetuba, at the headwaters of the Tietê river”, said the president of Abrem (Brazilian Association of Metal Recyclers).
The name “washers” occurs because the companies are on the banks of rivers or streams and use water to dissolve the lees to extract the aluminum from there. For every 1,000 tons of sludge, around 50 tons of aluminum are removed.
Under environmental rules, after “mining” the metal, the water used in this process must be recovered, and the remainder of the material must be disposed of in class 1 landfills – special to receive hazardous waste, harmful to health.
The situation in Itaquaquecetuba caught the attention of the association, according to Lopes, after Mayor Eduardo Boigues Queroz (PP) shared videos on social networks in which he denounced the environmental degradation caused by companies and asked the population to denounce violators.
“We have been doing the desilting of the river, with Daee [Departamento de Águas e Energia Elétrica]. It’s months of work, and when you see it, on a weekend, the work of months is thrown away. They are not businessmen, they are criminals,” said the mayor.
According to the municipality, inspections find it difficult to spot irregularities because waste is usually disposed of at night, on holidays or on rainy days —rain helps to reduce the ammonia odor.
In addition to the companies in Itaquaquecetuba, there were also problems reported in Suzano and Guarulhos.
The association of recyclers estimates that each of the companies operating in the Itaquaquecetuba region produces around 1,000 tons of waste per month. In the state, still according to her, there are about ten companies working in this field, about 30 across the country.
“With so much salt, it will make the water brackish, and leaving the water brackish, it kills all the fish and all the life that is there in that river. Apart from that, this salt can penetrate into the soil and reach the groundwater. [A água] It will be unfit for consumption, for drinking, for irrigation, for a lot of things”, says Lopes.
The flagrant witnessed by the Sheet, at the end of November, it was done by teams from Itaquaquecetuba, but the company was in neighboring Suzano. Therefore, it was left to the inspectors to activate the local inspection by telephone.
According to Yasmin Zampieri Sampaio, Secretary of the Environment for Itaquaquecetuba, three companies were being monitored at the end of the year, installed on the banks of the Caputera.
One of them had been fined twice after irregular disposal was found, in 2021 and 2022.
“At this company, red-handed disposal was verified. We removed the clandestine pipes with the excavator and those responsible were taken to the DP [distrito policial]’ said the secretary.
THE Sheet He searched for a week for those responsible for the company Ecológica Reciclagem, but received no response. The report sent messages to the cell phones of those responsible that appear in the official records, called all the phones registered in the company’s name and sent an email to the company’s accountant, which appears on specialized websites, also with no response.
For the president of the association of recyclers, there is a need for a change in the laws on the disposal of recycling waste. The companies that generate the sludge, he argues, should be prevented from selling the material as scrap and be forced to dispose of it correctly.
When contacted, the Suzano City Hall informed that the company caught by the Itaquaquecetuba team had been closed in November after inspection work, as it was located in an irregular area. “Administrative measures regarding the company have been taken and the legal measures are being analyzed with the city hall’s legal sector”, says a note sent to the report.
“It is also worth noting that crimes of this kind are monitored by the Civil Police, by Gaema (Special Action Group for the Defense of the Environment), by Cesteb (Environmental Company of the State of São Paulo) and other competent bodies, focused on environmental protection”, says note.
Cetesb, also wanted, says that it carried out joint inspection actions with teams from the City of Itaquaquecetuba in companies that work in the field of recovery and washing of aluminum sludge, in September 2022, but no irregularities were observed.
The company also informed that, in the last two years, two of these companies “were subject to notices with warnings and fines, for operating without the proper licenses, improper disposal of waste or release of effluents into bodies of water”.
Also according to the note, the Guarulhos Agency applied a Temporary Interdiction Notice to a company that, since January 2021, “has had its activities paralyzed”.
“In this case, the enterprise had an Operating License from Cetesb, however, its renewal was rejected, since the company was not meeting the technical requirements established for its operation, which led to the imposition of fines and finally the interdiction mentioned.”
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