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🇺🇾 Uruguay /Environment & Climate

What happens when you dump trash where you should not? Montevideo’s fines in recent years

From El País · () Spanish

Translated from Spanish and summarized by DistantNews. Read the original for the full story.

At a glance

News Documents & data New plan
  • Montevideo can impose environmental fines of up to 350 readjustable units, nearly 680,000 Uruguayan pesos, for improper waste disposal.
  • The city issued 133 fines in 2016, rising to 490 in 2018, before enforcement dropped sharply during the COVID-19 pandemic and later resumed.
  • The administration is replacing some street containers with household or shared residential bins and plans to remove half of the public containers by the end of its term.

Montevideo’s street-container system is “collapsed,” according to Environmental Development Director Leonardo Herou, while the city continues to struggle with illegal dumping and waste management.

The question facing the municipality is straightforward: what happens when a resident leaves trash in the wrong place, or a business uses a public container for its own waste? Under departmental rules, some environmental violations can bring fines of up to 350 readjustable units, just under 680,000 Uruguayan pesos.

Herou says the city is pursuing what he calls a “cultural change,” combining environmental education with penalties. “It is achieved through environmental education, where we are working hard, and with sanctions when things do not work,” he told El País. He added that the municipality is working to improve the regulations, but that this does not prevent it from applying the rules already in force.

Montevideo began systematic waste-management inspections a decade ago. In 2016, it created the Environmental Monitoring and Control Center and installed cameras at several illegal dumping sites. The cameras record incidents, officials check whether they breach environmental rules, and the municipality then identifies those responsible.

The data supplied to El País through an access-to-information request is incomplete for 2016 to 2023. It shows 133 fines in 2016, 315 in 2017, 490 in 2018 and 204 in 2019. There were six fines in 2020 and none in 2021, the hardest pandemic years. Fines returned to six in 2022 and 44 in 2023. During those years, the available records show almost 9,500 readjustable units in penalties, equivalent to about 10.7 million pesos using the annual average.

The administration’s main cleanup initiative under Mayor Mario Bergara is a new collection system. The city is removing street containers and replacing them with bins inside individual homes, cooperatives or housing complexes where conditions allow. Its goal is to remove half of the containers on public roads by the end of the term.

It is achieved through environmental education, where we are working hard, and with sanctions when things do not work.

· Leonardo HerouMontevideo’s Environmental Development director described the city’s approach to changing waste-disposal behavior.
About this summary

Originally published by El País in Spanish. Translated, summarized, and contextualized automatically by DistantNews, with a note on how the source frames the story. Not individually reviewed before publishing. How this works.

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