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Chile

Chile has garnered international attention for its free market economic policies, devastating earthquakes, and decades of political change. Its neighbors remember Chile's history of territorial expansion. All of these factors have affected its changing patterns of consumption and waste.

Chile's long, thin profile along the Pacific Ocean contains a highly urbanized population of about 17 million. The country had a purchasing power parity (PPP) of about $15,000 per capita in the late-2000s, which ranked about 76th worldwide. Income inequality was relatively great.

Water

Chile has served as a paradigmatic case for studies of water privatization, and this process has affected patterns of water consumption and sewage treatment. In the early 1980s, the military government established water rights as a private commodity in the constitution. This created perhaps the world's most free market approach to water rights. The entities that delivered water and sewage services were still public, but democratic governments from the late 1980s into the early 2000s also gradually privatized this sector. Foreign economic interests, such as a pension fund for Canadian teachers, have invested heavily in Chilean water providers. Government agencies increasingly regulate water quality, and policies promote the extension of services to under-served areas.

This system has provoked considerable debate in Chile and internationally. Water is piped to nearly 100 percent of the urban population, and sewage treatment has risen from about 20 percent in 1999 to 84 percent in 2008, making Chile a leader in Latin America. While low-income Chileans can qualify for subsidies, the rise in water prices that accompanied privatization has led to a marked decrease in water use per capita. However, many observers complain that the system favors wealthy sectors of the country to the neglect of others. For example, the rates of water connection and sewage treatment in rural areas are much lower. And, contrary to expectation, Chile's level of water losses, already high, actually rose after privatization.

Exports

Much of Chile's wealth has come from the export of commodities. The War of the Pacific (1879–83) in which Chile took its northern extension in the Atacama Desert from Peru and Bolivia, allowed Chile to dominate the extraction and exportation of nitrates, which were valued abroad primarily as fertilizers. Wood used in this industry came from nearby forests of the tamarugo tree, which were severely depleted: 21st-century government efforts to replenish this tree must contend with falling groundwater tables to feed nearby towns’ consumption.

In recent decades, copper has overshadowed nitrates as Chile's main export, and Chile remains the world's dominant producer of each commodity. Copper mining is centered in the Atacama Desert and the north-central region. Pollution controls have become progressively stricter since the return to democracy in the 1990s. Prior to that, legal environmental controls were weak or nonexistent, and mines’ emissions of arsenic, cyanide, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, and heavy metals into the air, ground, and water caused significant health problems among workers, nearby residents, and plants and animals. Despite marked reductions, waste from copper mining remains a significant environmental hazard.

Energy and Carbon

Chile's energy consumption has increased rapidly, along with its gross domestic product (GDP), since the 1980s. As with water, Chile has almost completely privatized its energy sector since then, and foreign investors control much of it. Access is almost universal. The vast majority of the supply has come from a mix of hydroelectric plants, coal, and natural gas. To reduce Chile's dependence on Argentina and on decreasingly predictable hydrology, the country is increasing its reliance on coal.

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