To talk about bioremediation, citizen participation and the Las Salinas neighborhood project, Salvador Donghi -member of the scientific committee for the remediation of the land- and Esteban Undurraga -development manager of the company- were on Radio Viña FM’s East to West program. The conversation revolved around the bioremediation technique proposed by the scientific committee to clean up the land. In this sense, Salvador Donghi assured that “this is an iconic project because it is the first time in Chile that a bioremediation process is carried out in an urban site”. Regarding the technique, he explained that “what bioremediation does is that it uses the natural capacity of soils, which contain bacteria, to take care of contaminants”… “we take those bacteria that are used to, they are adapted to live with contaminants and we give them a certain type of food that are nutrients that are made based on compost, we increase that population of bacteria, that population of bacteria that increases in the background you are creating more mouths and those mouths eat the hydrocarbons. Once those hydrocarbons disappear, because they are eaten by the bacteria and become part of their system, cytoequeleton or metabolic system, as the bacteria run out of food, those bacteria end up dying”. Responding to those who say that the level of contamination in the soil is not clear, Esteban Undurraga indicated that “we know exactly where these pockets of contamination are, we know their concentrations, we know their composition and therefore we know how we have to treat it, through bioremediation, but we have to do soil engineering to get there. And this soil engineering is basically almost surgical work in the field, I would say”. Regarding the type of urban development project that would be carried out once the land is cleaned up, Undurraga explained that “we are proposing a new center, we are proposing a mixed-use project, which hopefully will create a new local economy, as the old center of Viña used to be, and we also believe that the need for green areas is fundamental not only as a recreational requirement, but also because the growth of the city has been deteriorating all the environmental services that wild and artificial green areas can provide to the city”. In this sense, Undurraga stressed the importance of public spaces in well-planned city projects. “Our project tries to seek a balance between an urban development, we have a proposal of almost 40% of public space in our master plan, we are improving, almost doubled the conditions of requirements of the Regulatory Plan regarding public spaces, because finally the public space belongs to everyone.” Finally, when asked about his perception of the citizen participation generated by this environmental evaluation process, Esteban Undurraga commented that “far from making us uncomfortable or anything like that, we are taking the enormous opportunity to try to respond in depth to each of the observations”. Finally, Salvador Donghi emphasized that “here there are institutions with a long trajectory in terms of training professionals and contributing to regional and national development, which are the academies, the universities”.
