| | |  Editorials | Environmental 
Garbage Truck Donated by Sister City to Help Fuel Vallarta Recycling Efforts
 Colby Frazier — Daily Sound
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May 16, 2010
| | MarBorg Industries and the Santa Barbara Sister City Committee celebrated the donation of a front-loader compacting garbage truck to Puerto Vallarta. Santa Barbara mayor Helene Schneider checks out the truck. (Victor Maccharoli) | |
Recycling in Puerto Vallarta will soon get a whole lot more efficient with the addition of a brown Peterbilt front-loader compacting garbage truck, courtesy of MarBorg Industries and the Santa Barbara, CA Sister City Committee.
The donation has been in the works for nearly a year, ever since a mayor from Puerto Vallarta, on a visit to Santa Barbara, swung by MarBorg’s behemoth recycling facility, where roughly 500 tons of material is recycled each day.
“He was just entranced,” Barbara Ellis, president of the Santa Barbara Puerto Vallarta Sister Cities Committee, said of the mayor. “He was really, really excited.”
Word of the mayor’s interest in recycling spread to MarBorg President Mario Borgatello, who offered some assistance.
“Mario turns to him and says, ‘I can give you a truck’ just like that,” Ellis recalled.
Borgatello said the truck will be towed to San Diego and driven the rest of the way by a MarBorg employee and the person who will be operating the truck in Puerto Vallarta. He said a MarBorg driver will spend a week there to train drivers and mechanics.
This isn’t the first MarBorg truck to find a second home south of the border.
In 2008, the mayor of the Mexican town Union de San Antonio met with Borgatello, and he too came away with a front-loader truck.
Gil Garcia, a former Santa Barbara City councilman and president of the Sister Cities Committee, said the truck will help work wonders for Puerto Vallarta.
“Their landfill is in a disastrous condition,” he said. “It’ll help recycling for sure.”
He said the truck will be added to a fleet of a couple of other back-loader trucks, which typically require waste-management workers to manually place bags of trash into.
Garcia said the front-loader truck will help eliminate the number of small garbage cans that require the back-loader trucks, and often end up being stolen and used for housing.
He noted that the large metal bins that can be heaved by the truck, generally stay put.
Another obstacle to recycling in Puerto Vallarta, Garcia said, are unions that represent people who rummage through trash on the landfill. He said any changes to the recycling and garbage structure must go through the unions, making it difficult to effect change.
Aside from donating heavy equipment, Garcia said the Sister Cities Program has sent Santa Barbara students to Puerto Vallarta to help spark recycling from the bottom up.
Santa Barbara Mayor Helene Schneider, who climbed behind the wheel of the truck and fired it up during a news conference in front of City Hall, said the donation is “a great example of how sister cities can work.”
“I think this is going to be a huge improvement for Puerto Vallarta and strengthen our sister city relationship,” she said.
The truck, of which MarBorg has a fleet of roughly 16, isn’t cheap. A MarBorg official said a new truck carries a $250,000 price tag, while the used truck bound for Mexico is worth about $75,000.
Although the truck lacks the traditional MarBorg insignia, a new sign, written in Spanish, has been tacked to the vehicle.
According to Garcia, it says, in part: “Respect Friendship, Brotherhood and Love: These are the basic, fundamental principles represented by the donation of this vehicle.” |
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