No, this is not about our President’s big mouth.
I’m talking about real garbage, the one we throw to the bin every day and bring out to the waiting truck. It’s the smelly, unsightly and appetite-destroying ubiquitous thing that has been part of our daily lives. It’s right under our nose in the kitchen, at the toilet, under the desk and even in those little collapsible bins hanging at the back of the car seat.
We accumulate more than we throw; that’s for sure. So our trash rise from molehills to mountains that may soon come crashing down on us, sometimes literally, as in the case of those scavengers who died from landslides at the dumpsites.
Recently, garbage has become the main issue as local authorities decided to open up the landfill for reasons that made some — pardon the pun — smell something fishy. Aside from releasing climate-changing methane into the air, it spread the smell of filth all around the nearby communities.
It spoiled al fresco dining at the seaside restaurants along the South Reclamation Project and turned the once breezy cruise through the road there into a nasal nightmare.
Authorities have since tried to solve the problem by introducing enzymes into the garbage to hasten the decomposition of organic wastes, which are the source of the foul smell.
They have also brought back stricter implementation of the waste segregation policy, such as the scheduling of collection by garbage trucks of biodegradable and nonbiodegradable waste.
Since the start of this waste segregation campaign years ago, people have been asking: will our carefully marked garbage actually end up being properly sorted at the dumps?
Do we actually have efficient recycling systems and are they being used to process our nonbiodegradable wastes? Because if not, then we are just wasting time.
This reminds me many years ago of the visit to Cebu of “Rainbow Warrior,” the flagship of the international environmentalist group Greenpeace. Powered by both wind (through sails), solar and turbine engine (for emergency use mainly), the ship is ran by an international crew of volunteer activists.
Despite the difficult conditions of living in a small boat that sailed through oceans for months, the crew tried to live strictly according to the principles of a green living.
They relied mainly on solar panels for electricity and maintained a machine that turned seawater into potable water, an important resource.
But what struck me was their waste disposal system. The crew were careful not to throw garbage into the oceans. They sorted out their trash not just between biodegradable or nonbiodegradable but into even wider categories. Garbage bins were color coded and labeled “paper,” “plastic bags,” “water bottles,” “cans,” “food wastes,” “toxic wastes,” and so on.
This allowed them to easily collect recyclable items, preventing them from adding into the urban dumps. Organic wastes were later composted and used as loam for their compact garden on board.
The Greenpeace crew said that by carefully segregating and recycling their wastes, they had reduced the amount of garbage that was brought down from the ship for disposal into mainland landfills.
Rainbow Warrior goes around the world to visit cities and invite locals to their ship, where they give them lectures on various issues and tour them around boat premises.
That was how my friends and I got a chance to visit that boat and become inspired by how a group of people packed into such small quarters could actually make a big contribution to the environment. Spending most of their lives sailing across oceans forced them to try to live with what little supplies they have.
There’s a lot that Cebu can learn from the Rainbow Warrior, which paid us a visit years ago. We can start by segregating our wastes further into more garbage bins than just the usual “malata ug di malata.”
In our own house, we have since practiced composting long before the waste segregation campaign. We have also tried to recycle plastic bags and find new uses for such items as plastic water bottles and peanut butter jars.
How we compost may not be the correct method as we simply dump food scraps, paper and other organic wastes into a big bucket drilled with holes at the bottom. But these materials break down after a while and eventually turn into loam that we use in our small garden of mostly potted plants. We realize that we have since cut down our wastes into more than a third or a quarter of our former bulk.
The City Hall recently declared that they have since reduced garbage by about 30 percent during the first few days of the reimposition of waste segregation policy.
Being the source, we can help cutting down our own wastes by living like the crew of the Rainbow Warrior: consuming less, disposing less.
And, yeah, it’s really like what goes in and out of our mouth: garbage in, garbage out. Now, let’s talk about the President.