Waterways full of trash and flies feasting on rotten, uncollected garbage in a fast growing metropolis that struggles with managing its solid waste is a pitiful sight.
It’s been 14 years since the passage of the Solid Waste Management Act or Republic Act 9003, but local government units, which are mandated to manage solid waste in such a way that public health and the environment are protected aren’t winning the war.
The law provides for “a systematic, comprehensive and ecological solid waste management program.”
But garbage woes faced by communities are too obvious. We have a problem.
The Inayawan landfill in Cebu City and the Umapad dumpsite in Mandaue are insufficent for the cities’ needs. They truck their wastes to a private landfill in Consolacion town up north but still choke under the volume of garbage that remains uncollected in streets and neighborhoods. Waste segregation is still a strange concept for most households and barangays. This mindset alone shows that we’re not managing a basic urban “housekeeping” chore bigtime.
If the law was strictly followed, all open dumpsites should have been closed in 2006. Umapad was closed in 2010 and Inayawan’s so-called sanitary landfill, which had long exceeded its capacity, was partly closed in 2011.
But since that time, these facilities have been closed and opened – in the guise of being used as a transfer station. They barely operate as an effective material recovery facilities (MRF).
In January 15 this year, Cebu CIty Mayor Michael Rama shut the Inayawan landfill. For good, it seemed. Less than a month after, when the pressure built up, it was partly reopened as a transfer station.
Earlier this month, Mandaue City stopped its 27 barangays from dumping directly in the Consolacion landfill. The city found out that unsegregated waste was being dumped straight into the private landfill, a bonus for the private operator who benefited from more tipping fees from a higher volume of trash.
Band-aid remedies won’t do.
To be systematic in managing solid waste, segregation has to be at the source — in households, factories, business establishments. The discards have to be picked out and set aside to make it easier to recycle, reuse and to compost biodegradable matter.
Trash has to be sorted in MRFs in every barangay. In Cebu City only three of its 80 barangays an MRF – Kalunasan, Apas and Talamban.
Political will starts the whole cycle. Do the city executives have this in abundance?
Can they marshall their people to strictly implement policies on no littering, and no-segregation-no-collection?
Off and one, we see reports of sanitation workers issuing citation tickets to litterbugs and households that still throw out mixed trash. We haven’t heard much after that.
The laws are plentiful and clear. Technologies for recycling, composting, reducing and re-using are available. What we urgently need is discipline, follow-through and a determined leadership.
Sans political will and cooperation from the citizenry, we would have more queer situations like last Wednesday, when Cebu City’s environment officer ordered an impromptu clean up of a portion of the Mahiga Creek just behind his office – that he found too dirty – because the media was there.
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