Mexico City Plans Environmentally Friendly Project In Xochimilco: Tourist Zone Gets 'Green' Boats

Mexico City's government plans to provide the tourist zone of the Xochimilco canals with environmentally friendly boats and barges and to gradually substitute the usual wooden ones, which have very high maintenance costs, officials said. Mauricio Leon, director of infrastructure, modernization and innovation for DF, unveiled the plan on Monday. After presenting the first prototype of the ecologically sound craft last weekend, the plan is that the owners of the traditional gondola-like non-motorized boats form a cooperative to gradually replace them. The traditional wooden vessels with their colorful arches, formerly used mostly to transport goods but now dedicated almost exclusively to tourism, constitute "an enormous expense" since they must be renovated every year due to "the deterioration in recent years" of the water in the canals and the fungi it contains that degrade the wood, Leon said.

Created by scientists at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, or UNAM, the so-called "technoecological boat" preserves the typical characteristics that have made it a symbol of Mexico worldwide. The great advantage is that the new boat - called a "trajinera" - is made of recycled PET plastic (canal-polluting water and shampoo bottles and plastic bags), polyethylene and volcanic clay, a compound that provides the boats with greater durability and stability. Since they are made of recycled material, unlike the traditional ones for which 20 trees have to be cut down to make each one, they are much cheaper, require less maintenance and their durability is much greater - they can last as long as 120 years.

The problem is the cost of the machinery, Leon said, so that the ideal solution would be for the oarsmen to form "a cooperative able to get financing for the machines," which cost around five million pesos ($380,000). This is a long-term plan, because when the machines are installed, they can produce from three to four boats a week, and in Xochimilco there are currently over 1,500.