Thinking Green in Costa Rica

In my experience, all anybody knows about Costa Rica without intentionally doing research is that there are rainforests there. Maybe they know of the coffee. But of all the themes that one might find in typical Costa Rican behaviors, "thinking green" is one of the most prevalent. This post is about the different ways I encountered environmentalism in Costa Rica...

At Home

My host home was on a communal property with five small dwellings inhabited by members of one extended family, approximately 16 full-time residents and several more who visited daily. That many people produce a lot of refuse: or so you might think.

Very little goes to waste, and very little goes in the trash. In my home in America, most of our garbage is a result of food we've eaten. Wrappers, leftovers, etc. None of that is an issue in Costa Rica. 

My host family compound's veggie garden: watermelons, green
beans, black beans, carrots, potatoes, and peppers

For one thing, the food itself is oftentimes fresher and is not in nearly so much packaging as it is in the U.S. This cuts down greatly on non-recyclable trash like plastic wrappers. Something that removes them entirely is that many things are grown at home: namely fruits and vegetables. Secondly, there were no thrown away leftovers in my host home. In many homes leftovers from lunch are served again at dinner with a different side dish, or with corn tortillas instead of rice. Leftovers beyond that are either saved in the refrigerator for the next day or fed to the family's guard dog. My host home's compound had 3 guard dogs who only received leftover food, and 1 that was more of a "pet" by American standards and was never given human food. Fruit or vegetable cores, food that goes bad, or fruit that falls from trees in the garden and rots or bursts were thrown in one of two gigantic compost pits in the yard. 

Paper and plastic waste in my host home were put in gigantic trash bags and piled in a corner of the backyard for when the recycling truck came. Though I noted in my 7 weeks there that this pile was never moved or diminished by any recycling service. 

Trucks that did come were the garbage trucks. Outside every home and many businesses is a small metal post with a grated square receptacle on top, for garbage. Not everyone uses bags, sometimes the garbage is just stacked inside the receptacle (and often blows away in the wind). 

Beyond recycling, there is also a heavy mindset of no wasting of other resources, like electricity and water. In my host home, everything except my host mother's TV and the refrigerator was unplugged when not in use. During the daylight hours (5 AM - 5:30 PM pretty much all year) lights were typically kept off, even sometimes if it was rainy and dark. There were water heaters in some homes, but those had to be turned on manually before running the water to use them. There are no tumble dryers for clothes, everything is dried in the sun (even if that takes several days due to rain). 

Water is somewhat unavoidable to use in many ways. You can't avoid cooking with it, you can't avoid drinking it, and you can't avoid washing clothes in it. So, those things were simply done as efficiently as possible while reducing water use elsewhere. 

Most homes have a switch of some sort that can rereoute all water from their entire house directly to the washing machine when it is in use, to ensure that there is enough water present to properly wash the clothes. I found this out the hard way halfway through a shower one morning. I'm also pretty sure that the water at my host home was perhaps reused once or twice to wash more loads of laundry on the same day. Water is used to wash dishes, but only manually. There are no dishwasher machines in typical homes. And unlike Americans, Costa Ricans will rinse the plate, turn the water off, scrub the plate clean, then rinse it again. Total minimum water use. This is also true of bathing: most Costa Ricans will turn the shower on to rinse themselves, turn the water off, shampoo hair or whatever else needs to be done, then turn the water briefly on again to rinse off suds before they leave. 

Out & About

Recycling bins at a scenic overlook

When walking around in most places, you can usually find a recycling bin much more easily than you can find a trash can (for some reason the trash cans are never next to the recycling bins like they often are in the U.S.). This is the case in anything even remotely related to the environment: national parks, scenic overlooks, ferries, museums, etc. This is not the case in small towns and in San Jose. There it tends to be only sparse garbage cans, and even locals will stuff them to bursting with recyclables. 

I saw recycled bottle planters like this in several parks

The main difference between Costa Rican recycling bins and American recycling bins is the variety. In Costa Rica there are typically at least 3 recycling bins, but I saw as many as 5 in a row together. In the U.S. the categories are condensed into one receptacle and separated later, though the list of accepted items is shorter as well. 

In Costa Rica you can typically recycle: aluminum, paper, plastic (as in from bottles), plastic (as from food wrappers), cardboard, glass, and organic waste (food). 

Traveling

The whole green mindset is extremely prevalent in hotels, though the fact that it is even more present in the tourist industry (80% of the national economy for now) than in daily life makes me inclined to wonder if there is some degree of money motivation in the environmentalism.

Anyway, there were signs everywhere in every level of hotel about conserving water and electricity. Hotels advertised their "leaf" rating of their environmental friendliness over than their "star" rating, especially the Costa Rican-owned companies. In many ways they were just like standard American hotels, asking that you consider reusing your towels during your stay instead of requesting fresh ones daily, and to turn off lights when you leave the room. 

But, there were some that had projects that I had never heard of from American hotels. Outside of the central valley, many have water heated by solar panels and waste plumbing purified by "bio-reactors" of bacteria and chemicals. The Pozo Azul Tent Suites in Sarapiquí were constructed using only wood from trees thinned out of a reforestation effort that would die anyway. 

In the end, I truly admire the efforts to stay green, regardless of the motivation: money or consciousness of the Earth. Many of the choices--like the tent suite wood sourcing--are just a smarter, less wasteful way to do things that everyone should strive to achieve.