Dumping dilemmas: the lessons of Asunción's Cateura landfill
Navigating the terrain of short-term incentives and long-term outcomes
Introduction
Cities generate waste, which needs to end up somewhere. Ideally, in a landfill. No matter how carefully the location of the landfill is chosen, some people will be unhappy about it. We can all understand why. Landfills are aesthetically unpleasant, emit bad odours, and create other negative externalities. But there is no getting around the fact that they need to be somewhere. Some locations are undoubtedly worse than others. It’s bad enough if a local neighbourhood is negatively affected, but it’s much worse if an entire city’s, say, water supply or air quality is compromised. The Cateura landfill, which until last year, served as the final destination for all the rubbish generated in Asunción (Paraguay), threatened to be an example of the latter.
Cateura landfill - a ticking time bomb?
The landfill is roughly 1 km away from the flood-prone Paraguay river. One doesn’t need to be an expert on environmental matters (and I’m far from being one) to understand that if a landfill is flooded by the river that provides the city’s residents with drinking water, bad consequences will follow.
Instead of trying to precisely estimate the risk of an environmental disaster, let’s just assume there is a small probability it could happen. For instance, some years before the landfill was eventually shut down, some parts of Asunción suffered serious flooding. Around 40 000 residents needed to be evacuated, and dozens of the city’s schools closed. Distancing ourselves from recent events, it was probably clear to people, even many decades ago, that this location is, well, suboptimal. So, how did the landfill end up there?
Two possibilities come to mind. The first one is that people started taking their rubbish there, and the landfill grew organically until the authorities could no longer ignore it. Then the city built some infrastructure around it to mitigate the environmental impact the unauthorized dumping was causing, and turned it into the official landfill of the city. The second possibility is that the authorities selected a location, and Cateura was the unhappy winner.
Short time horizons
Both explanations share a common feature: short time horizons. In the first, bottom-up approach, the short time horizon comes about due to poverty. When you have a pressing problem to solve, like getting food on the table or paying for electricity, you can’t worry about more distant dangers. Your priority is surviving the day or the week—not optimizing for a pleasant environment 20 years down the line. Staying with our example, dumping your rubbish close to your home for free is a value proposition difficult to beat.
In the second, top-down approach, a short time horizon manifests itself differently. The politician probably knows that the location he chose is bad, but he doesn’t care. By the time the landfill causes a problem, he will be out of office anyway. The US mathematician Richard Hamming, writing about project management, summed up this logic eloquently: “There is never time to do the job right, but there is always time to fix it later.” Well, even better if the guy after you will have to do the fixing.
Before we develop this logic further, let’s do a small detour. If the politician knows the location is bad, why not build it somewhere else? Because the location that’s bad from an environmental perspective is frequently the location that’s convenient from a political perspective. Like the areas inhabited by the poor, the marginalised, and the politically powerless.
Examples of such cases abound. In his book The Power Broker, Robert A. Caro documents how the planned path of the Northern State Parkway, one of New York’s highways, was moved by roughly 5 km to avoid running through the middle of a golf course constructed by a powerful businessman. In contrast, when local farmers wanted to move a section of the highway by 100 meters lest their land would be cut in half, their request was denied.
The cycle of inaction
The short time horizon also explains why the landfill wasn’t closed earlier. In any given year, and even over a 4-year mandate, the probability of something catastrophic happening is quite low. But the probability over a longer time horizon (e.g., half a century) can be quite high. It’s not in the politician’s interest to incur short-term costs by relocating the landfill, even though everyone would be better off with an alternative location in the long run. When he is up for re-election in 4 years, only the costs of the relocation will be visible.
The above reasoning assumes that the politician perceives the risks of the landfill correctly, and it’s his incentives that explain the bad outcome. But he could easily misperceive the risks: People tend to evaluate a small probability differently depending on whether they see it written down (i.e., a 0.5% probability of something bad happening) or learn it from experience. In the latter case, the typical finding is that small probabilities are underweighted. To put it differently, if the actual probability is 0.5% a year, the politician uses a probability smaller than 0.5% in his mental calculus. This is the case because he almost never experiences the low-probability event, making it seem very unlikely and low in salience. This cognitive distortion further decreases the probability that the landfill would be relocated.
Cateura closes down
So far, I argued that all factors seem to work hand in hand to make relocation unlikely. But the landfill was closed eventually. Why?
One possibility is that a politician with an unusual incentive structure was elected. For instance, he could be an atypical politician willing to sacrifice his personal advancement on the altar of the public good. These politicians exist and should be praised, but unfortunately, they are like the proverbial needle in a haystack. To understand a typical politician’s behaviour, we need to look at his incentives and how they evolve over time.
In 2020, there were several fires at the landfill, leading to heavy smoke in the city’s coastal and other areas. In other words, the problem became temporarily more salient (and scary) to a substantial part of the population. Calls for action followed, and the city’s governing body eventually announced the closure and clean-up of the landfill. Although we can never know for sure, a hypothesis I find quite plausible is that the fires changed politicians’ short-term calculus, making the status quo of inaction less attractive politically than relocating the landfill.
Region-beta paradox
This case is an interesting example of the region-beta paradox. The gist of the paradox is that by making a situation worse in the short run, you can sometimes make it better in the long run. Without a devastating fire, the landfill could still be operating as usual since the environmental risk it poses doesn’t reach the critical threshold in any given year. The fire pushes the situation over the critical threshold, triggering political action. Sometimes an event that’s worse than the status quo in the short run can engender processes that improve the situation in the long run.