Now that the Inayawan landfill is “open for business” again, the enforcement of the “no segregation, no collection” policy/ordinance of the Cebu City government is not only critical but should be a public mandate for every city resident.
Barely had the landfill opened when over 800 tons of unsegregated garbage were dumped by the city’s garbage trucks, most of them collected from households who have not been following the waste segregation policy for any number of reasons such as ignorance and laziness.
To remind city residents anew, here’s the lowdown on the city’s waste segregation policy: garbage is to be separated into biodegradable, recyclable, residual, special waste and plastics. All of these have to be stored or disposed of separately.
Biodegradable garbage, such as food and kitchen wastes, are scheduled for collection on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Recyclable wastes, such as paper and glass bottles, will be collected on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays.
Residual wastes are scheduled for collection on the mornings of Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday; while those categorized as “special waste” will be every afternoon of Wednesday. Plastics are scheduled for collection every Saturday.
This means every household should have five big garbage containers that will contain these five types of garbage for easier collection and disposal by the garbage collectors who will collect them on the aforementioned schedules.
In fact, these reminders should be posted prominently in every barangay for the information of city residents. More importantly, the barangay should hire watchers or tap volunteers who will visit each household to check up on their garbage disposal efforts.
That’s just one of many ways we could think of to ensure compliance with the city’s waste segregation ordinance because, frankly, we have become too lazy and too dependent on the city to dispose of our garbage for us.
Kalubihan Barangay Chairman Carmilo Milan, whose area’s population of 15,000 people, mostly transients, said commercial establishments have better compliance in segregating wastes than households.
And we’re not even talking about the dumping of garbage in canals and waterways which have repeatedly caused floods in most streets. The Environmental Management Bureau and former councilor Nida Cabrera said the landfill, with an area of five hectares is expected to accommodate more garbage. But they admitted that it has only two more years at most before it outlives its usefulness.
This early it’s time for Cebu City residents to do their part to segregate their garbage in order to help the city government prolong the landfill’s life span until it can find another landfill site.
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