Invited to the meeting, academics Salvador Donghi and Luis Álvarez gave their expert view on the remediation project of the Las Salinas site, which for years housed industrial activities, and which today seeks to be reincorporated into the city of Viña del Mar. “Behind this work there is a , not only in contaminated areas, but also in tailings, landfills, airports, gas stations…” emphasized the director of the Institute of Geography of the PUCV, Luis Alvarez. Both members of the Las Salinas Scientific Committee have dedicated the last two years much of their time and work to conceive, in an unprecedented collaboration between academia and the company, a soil and water remediation project, a pioneer in Chile, to clean up the Jorge Montt area without generating environmental externalities. The selected process, known as “bioremediation”, consists of using bacteria to accelerate the degradation of contaminants. “Bioremediation takes the microbacteria that are native to the site, activates them by adding moisture and the compost additive so that they reproduce faster and do the work of feeding on the contaminating elements, mainly hydrocarbons,” explained the academic from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso. The project is currently in the process of environmental evaluation (SEIA), in light of the observations made by organizations and individuals, including institutions, NGOs and neighbors of the project. Prior to the delivery of the observations, an Advance Citizen Participation (PACA) process was carried out in August 2018 to allow the community to be informed about the project in a total of 5 meetings in different sectors of the commune of Viña del Mar, in which approximately 90 neighbors participated. Regarding the number of observations generated by the project – foreseeable considering that although the bioremediation technique is used worldwide, it is not a well-known technique in our country – the academics emphasized their contribution to achieving the maximum level of demand in the execution of the project. “The more observations there are, the better for the project and for the citizens,” said Salvador Donghi. Finally, both experts emphasized the need to remediate the land, considering on the one hand the level of remaining contamination, which although it does not represent a risk to people’s health, currently limits its use, and, on the other hand, its strategic location in a city that lacks space to grow and improve its quality of life. In this respect, Álvarez commented that Viña could not “afford to have a liability there, a waste land, which is called to solve the city’s problems”. For his part, Donghi insisted that “whatever the urban destination of the land, it has a prior condition which is decontamination”, arguing that “to prolong this situation is to continue sacrificing land that needs to be remediated”. Check the complete interview in this
