FACTORTIERRA

The project of athlete Ronald Benites for protecting the environment and our health across Piura Region. All photographs from Ronald Benites Archive .   CHULUCANAS, Peru - Modern times imply to live fastly, it is said. But how much fast? For our partner Ronald Benites , it may be as fast as a bicycle, which he has run around 840 km or 520 miles of highway inside Piura Region, with two purposes: to make the people concious about the care of Earth, and to educate about using a transportation mean that produces no significant impacts on the environment, benefits the health instead. The vehicle, created in actual Germany in 1817 , has been during 20th century one of the most popular transportation means  across Piura, especially the coast, and very particularly at the rural zone where it competed with animals of burden. Currently, its using at Piura's cities is relatively restricted and at the countryside, the bikes as well as the animals have been displaced by motorcycle...

The contamination tarnishes the Pearl of Chira.   By Mako Fernández Guerrero , Nelson Peñaherrera Castillo , & Ronald Zevallos Muro . Photographs by Franco Alburqueque .   SULLANA, Peru – The rumor –because no one confirmed the source—ran like spread powder: the second most dangerous city of Peru after Callao. The inexistent tourism vanished, the Sullana-natives  abroad were seen bad, coming to this city from other places equaled to enter a war zone.   Until 2013, the second most important city of Piura, one of the 20 most important ones in Peru (after the 15 th place), concentrated about 150,000 people of 1.7 million who lived across Piura Department , according to the National Institute of Statistics and Informatics (2007). It’s the capital city of Sullana Province and it hosted the half of its population, according to the same source.   Where have the ddiscouraging merit come out from? It was repeated, it was repeated, and even it provocated an emerge...

How did it start up and break the first plant to process solid residues across Piura?   By Nelson Peñaherrera Castillo . Photos by Simon Garragate .   SULLANA, Peru – A cistern truck gets again to a sewer hole at the skirts of Bellavista City toward El Cucho Village. It contains residual water from Humboldt squid process that is made at the Industrial Zone. The Sullana Province’s Municipality (MPS as its initials in Spanish) admits that the equivalent to 70 vehicles of that kind (about 30 tons each one) eliminate residual water to Chira River through that hole. This means 2.1 million liters every 24 hours.   “It’s rich in ammonia and nitrogen,” the manager of one processing plants explains to me. The liquid smells bad, but it is not polluting technically neither legally, first, because it’s about an enriched fluid, second, because the Peruvian Criminal Code does not specify the stench as a cause of contamination crime.   But, the things change when the whole spill...