In a city that once prided itself on growth at any cost, the Mayor, a former business leader, now takes pride in his campaign: "Cubatao -- City Symbol of Ecology." This campaign includes planting 130,000 trees, establishing four municipal "ecological parks," requiring environmental education in city schools, building bicycle pathways and a sewer system and enlisting Brazil's renowned landscape artist, Burle Marx, to design a parkway entrance for the city.
"Cubatao was always described as one of the most polluted places in the world," the Mayor, Nei Eduardo Serra, said. "Today, Cubatao has become an example of a solution to the problem of third-world pollution."
"Cosipa has all the technical plans approved and a lot of equipment has been purchased," said Sergio Correa Alejandro, the regional manager of [Cetesb]. "With luck, they will be in compliance in two years."
Special to The New York Times
After school let out one recent afternoon here, Cleiton Celio Silva Araujo grabbed hooks, line and a bamboo pole and scrambled down a bank of the Cubatao River. Within an hour, the gangly 13-year-old was filling a plastic bag with fish.
Out of place in this tableau was the background: metal chimneys and ducts of a riverside styrene plant. Even more out of place was a label that Brazilian environmentalists long ago gave to this industrial city: the Valley of Death.
In a striking example of a turnaround in industrial pollution in Latin America, Cubatao's residents are now enjoying the benefits of a frontal attack on the poisons that once flowed freely from Brazil's largest industrial park.
Today, a verdant mantle of trees and bushes cover mountainsides that surround the steel, fertilizer and petrochemical plants of Cubatao Valley. Less than a decade ago, clouds of ammonia and fluorides rendered the mountain ridges a lifeless skyline of dead tree trunks.
In health clinics here, the infant mortality rate dropped in half and oxygen masks fell out of fashion as the number of life-threatening smog alerts fell from 16 in 1984 to one last year. 'Lemonade From the Lemon'
And in a city that once prided itself on growth at any cost, the Mayor, a former business leader, now takes pride in his campaign: "Cubatao -- City Symbol of Ecology." This campaign includes planting 130,000 trees, establishing four municipal "ecological parks," requiring environmental education in city schools, building bicycle pathways and a sewer system and enlisting Brazil's renowned landscape artist, Burle Marx, to design a parkway entrance for the city.
"Cubatao was always described as one of the most polluted places in the world," the Mayor, Nei Eduardo Serra, said. "Today, Cubatao has become an example of a solution to the problem of third-world pollution."
Convinced that others should learn from Cubatao's experience, Mr. Serra plans to charter buses to bring delegates here from the United Nations Conference on Development and the Environment, which will be held next year in Rio de Janeiro. Riding buses to this city of 130,000 people 35 miles south of Sao Paulo will undoubtedly be American and Mexican environmentalists interested in cutting pollution in Mexico as part of a North American free trade pact.
"The Mayor has managed to make lemonade from the lemon," said an admirer, Werner E. Zulauf, an engineer who in the mid-1980's was president of Cetesb, Sao Paulo state's environmental protection agency.
Cubatao appeared to have hit bottom in 1981, the year Mr. Serra and a group of fellow thinkers formed a group called Valley of Life.
Blocked by a 2,800-foot mountain range, thermal inversions routinely occurred, fueled by 114,416 tons of particulate matter that Cubatao's smokestacks annually belched into the air. Deadening rivers, the valley's 23 major industries annually poured out a liquid filth that added up to 22,678 tons of organic matter and 1,467 tons of heavy metals, according to Cetesb. Regulations Enforced
The plants here were built during Brazil's headlong industrialization of the 1960's and 1970's and few had pollution controls. Mr. Zulauf recalled the reaction of businessmen in December 1983 when he ordered companies to comply with existing antipollution regulations.
"The industrialists immediately started telephoning the Governor," he recalled, referring to Franco Montoro. "But the Governor refused to take their calls. He told them to see me."
Political backing turned out not to be enough. In the next year, Cubatao truly hit bottom.
One evening in February 1984, gas leaking from a pipeline collected below a slum of wooden shanties. A spark set off an inferno that claimed 99 lives, by official count. In January 1985 summer downpours touched off a series of landslides from denuded mountain slopes. Mud first blocked a highway to the Atlantic coast, and then a rail link to the interior. Finally, shifting earth hit a factory, sending a cloud of 15 tons of ammonia heading toward Vila Parisi, a slum built in the industrial zone. Civil defense authorities had to temporarily evacuate 5,000 people.
Against this backdrop, industrialists started to negotiate timetables and technologies for cutting pollution. Visible Results
Today, the results are "impressive," said Rolando Roebbelen, owner of a natural food restaurant here and founder of a private group, the Ecological Association of Cubatao.
By installing filters, scrubbers and precipitators, companies cut overall emissions of particulates in the valley by 72 percent, to 31,545 tons a year. The slum threatened by toxic clouds has been razed and its inhabitants relocated outside the industrial zone.
With ammonia and fluoride emissions cut to 4 percent of previous levels, leafy vegetation started to spread across the mountain ridges.
"It was something visible -- one year later you had to cut your way through landslide areas with a machete," said Gunther Bantel, a steel company engineer who was a founding member of the Valley of Life group.
To speed reforestation, a helicopter sprayed bare mountainsides with gelatin pellets containing tree seeds.
Turning to water pollution, companies cut the flow of organic wastes by 93 percent, to 1,608 tons. The flow of heavy metals was cut by 97 percent, to 44 tons.
To date, companies here have spent $420 million on the cleanup. To goad foot draggers forward, Cetesb has levied $1.2 million in fines since 1984.
To pay for adopting first-world antipollution equipment in a third-world nation, the World Bank extended about $100 million in low-interest loans to five companies here. So far, the only major company out of compliance is Cosipa, Brazil's largest steel company and the valley's largest employer.
"Cosipa has all the technical plans approved and a lot of equipment has been purchased," said Sergio Correa Alejandro, the regional manager of Cetesb. "With luck, they will be in compliance in two years."
Symbolizing Sao Paulo's commitment to keeping a close watch for future potential backsliding, Mr. Alejandro moved in early June into a newly constructed agency office building on a bank of the Cubatao River. Looking over the heads of the fishermen, Mr. Alejandro has a daily view of some of Brazil's largest fertilizer and petrochemical plants.
Symbolizing local caution over the environmental advances, Cleiton, the young fisherman, cast his line almost in the shadow of the environmental agency building and confessed: "I actually give the fish away. My father doesn't let me eat them because he says the the river is polluted."