Mexico sees new wetlands as answer to water woes

Cihuatlan, Mexico, Jul 7 (EFE).- A wetland created here by conscious human intervention holds out the prospect of conserving water and protecting the environment in Mexico.

“The tools to create the wetland are cutting-edge technology and some based on nature itself,” Jesus Lucatero Diaz, director of Public Affairs, Communication and Sustainability for Arca Continental Mexico, told Efe Thursday in Cihuatlan, a coastal municipality in the western state of Jalisco.

Arca Continental is a unit of Industria Mexicana de Coca-Cola, which provides funding for the project in line with a commitment to return to nature 100 percent of the water it uses to make soft drinks.

The Cihuatlan wetland is one of four planned nationwide.

Arca hopes to forge partnerships with local authorities and communities to promote environmental protection, Lucatero Diaz said.

“For us it’s important to find allies who give impetus to these programs. It’s the golden triangle: to find an association among government, society and companies,” he said.

“And in this project we expand forces with the Jalisco government and the Cihuatlan municipality, but without the commitment of the people, it would have been difficult to make it a reality,” the executive said.

Once complete, the wetland should be capable of filtering and recycling roughly 3 million liters (792,560 gallons) a day of residual water, according to Cihuatlan’s top environmental official, Mario Gomez Sanchez.

The aim is to emulate the function of natural formations such as the nearby Laguna de Barra de Navidad, ranked in the framework of the Ramsar Convention as a Wetland of International Importance.

The only energy-consuming elements of the created wetland are electric pumps that push the water to a “distribution hub” that separates out the larger bits of solid waste, and a chamber where the liquid is sterilized with UV rays.

“With the crisis of scarcity and climate change, it’s important to treat the water, to have the technologies that help us clean the water we have here and to do it in an ecological manner, environmentally correctly, and that communities benefit from it,” Lucatero told Efe.

Some of the water filtered through the wetland supplies a nursery established by Arca Continental and the municipality as a showcase for the potential of the project.

The four people employed in the nursery have managed to cultivate 30 different species of timber-yielding, edible and decorative plants, but organizers expect the operation will soon be able to produce and sell up to 50,000 plants annually.

EFE mg/dr