The economic activity of the city of Arrecife and consequently of the island of Lanzarote back in the fifties, when improvements in the port of Naos, the development of more modern fishing gear and the technological change that the sector implemented in its equipment, as well as large-scale ice production, the large artisanal fleet present, the creation of small factories that processed canned sardines, fishmeal and the manufacturing of other pelagics, generated a significant financial hub in the city. The feverish industrial activity meant that the city, a small port and its neighborhoods, were especially unpleasantly odorized by the nauseating aroma of stewed fish at all hours, day after day. Nevertheless, the bad smell generated with its industrial activity an important economy.
Currently, the economy that in those years provided a plus of certain well-being to its citizens, led them to preserve sustainable growth resulting in a maelstrom of unsustainable development later on in the course of time, starting from the admirable fact, that those of us who gave ourselves certain rules for the control of development and advocated for keeping an island away from the clutches of territorial predators, sadly saw how global capitalism modified, yes, not a paradisiacal place, yes a tranquil and environmentally respectful place, that conferred upon us the control of our land.
It is then when a new pestilent aroma permeates us, no longer just Arrecife, but the entire island, Lanzarote smells like poop, like “shit”. It is the new economy and its collateral effects.
An average citizen, weighing about 75 kgs, with a height of 1.65 and an age of 40 years who eats three meals a day, generates an average of waste of about 150 grams of feces, poop, or shit. This means that this prototype of individual is a poop generator that corresponds to 0.1 to 0.3% of their body weight, a little over 170 grams. Applying more weighted averages to a general population, we could establish a production of 5k per month or 60 kgs per year per person.
Thus in this way, we are advancing in an economic activity that continues contributing a very important exponential growth.
Economic development based on the inherent activity of intensive tourism and mass tourism, will result in the appearance of visible negative effects.
It is here when the final equation yields a disheartening result. Uncontrolled growth has begun to pay a high toll with the excessive expansion typical of simplistic policies, such as the achievement of increasingly higher objectives and figures in a territory as fragile as Canarias. The pull effect towards countries exporting unskilled labor, voracious consumers of public services such as healthcare, education, transport, housing and their immediate repercussions on vehicle density, food, insecurity, demand for electricity, for water and, of course, great generators of “poop or shit”.
Thus, we already have two new factors in the problem, the volume of poop from those who enter as tourists and the directly proportional volume of the labor force that accesses the island to provide them with the corresponding services in their different work activities, cleaners, gardeners, etc.
The waste generated, is treated in wastewater treatment plants, EDAR, the dry sludge resulting from the processes of anaerobic digestions yield impactful figures that we are going to analyze in certain assumptions or certain assumptions.
In the year 2025, 18.6 million tourists arrived in the Canary Islands, a successful 3% more than in the previous year, the resident population at the beginning of 2026 is 2.27 million individuals, that is, about 20.87 million producers of poop to whom we apply the study's figures, obtaining 104.35 million kilograms of waste that must be valorized in the environmental complexes.
Ultimately, the journey from generation to its treatment as waste leaves along the way important economies in the tourism sector, (a shame because this value is vampirized by global capitalism and here it leaves little of those monumental revenues), without overlooking the fees you pay in the sewage rates of each municipality in its fixed quota for the sanitation service, with the sanitation charge being for each m3 of water consumed bimonthly, applying a fixed fee of 2 to 12 euros depending on the meter's caliber and a sanitation charge of 0.52 euros for each m3 of water consumed.
The bad smell is therefore the olfactory characteristic resulting from the economy, formerly the stench of stewed fish and currently the stinking smell of shit due to the collapse that so many “shitters” generate on the islands.
