By Lise Alves, Senior Contributing Reporter
RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – With official festivities over, the city of Rio de Janeiro starts to consolidate the data for the 2018 Carnival season. With an estimated six million people, 1.5 million of which were tourists attending bloco parties and the two days of samba school parades, Carnival revelers left more than 486 tons of garbage on city streets.
“The city has structured itself for a complex and gigantic event, but many blocos underestimated their numbers,” Marcelo Alves, President of Riotur (city’s official tourism agency) told newspaper O Globo on Sunday.
“The Chora Me Liga (Cry, Call Me) bloco, for example, reported that it would have 50,000 revelers, we worked with the hypothesis of 100,000, but 600,000 showed up. There is no structure that can handle so many people,” concluded Alves.
In neighborhoods like Copacabana, where giants parades like the Bloco da Favorita occurred, Comlurb (Rio’s urban waste company) collected 35 tons of garbage, the largest volume collected at a bloco this year, according to officials. According to Riotur data more than 2,000 Comlurb workers were assigned to the task of keeping the city clean this Carnival season.
In the two days of samba school parades in the sambodromo, Comlurb reported collecting 120 tons of trash from stands and the parade venue. “In the Sambodromo alone 3 tons of recyclable materials were collected during the two parade days and already sent over to partner coops (for recycling),” Comlurb officials announced on the company’s social media
Despite laws against urinating in public roads and littering, from Friday, February 10th until Monday, February 13th 642 people had been fined for one of these two activities.
According to officials, party-goers caught urinating on public roads were fined R$ 563.30 on the spot, while those littering were made to pay R$ 205.60.