IT’S ABOUT time that we begin wrestling as a community of concerned residents with the garbage problem that we’ve been enduring here in Baguio these past many years. It may not be a source of comfort, but let’s face it, that has been the case, the same situation affecting many other cities and communities all over the country. Hindi tayo nag-iisa!
By law, the Ecological Waste Management Act of 2000, we are mandated to take care of our daily trash based on a fundamental tripartite strategy of Reduce-Reuse-Recycle. That means the waste we generate daily goes through this 3-stage process before the garbage people pick up the balance, as segregated into the biodegradable and the non-bio, and brought to a sanitary landfill for conversion into compost fertilizer or to energy. As for re-usable and recyclable items, these are brought to material recovery centers for livelihood-augmenting activities for added income.
Feeble efforts have marked local compliance with this basic law on waste management and disposition. Local governments were suddenly thrust into discarding the open dumpsite that had served as “tambakan” all through the years, leaving most of them opting to haul garbage out and dump this in landfills elsewhere, the farther the better.
From 2005 till now, waste disposal in Baguio has been on a three-stage strategy: trash collect at source, trash store somewhere out of the CBD, and trash transit and dump in Tarlac. For more than a decade, we’ve been doing this, while no available land area can be found to serve as an environmental sanitary landfill. Last heard, the ESL is all up in the air. Last heard, they’re still talking about an integrated waste disposal strategy that appears to be anchored on a waste to energy technology.
Meantime — and mind you, this has been going on for 12 years now — we’re still stuck on the basic strategy of hauling and dumping our trash out of Baguio, doing this day after day as our pipe-dreamers continue to dream. Meantime, we’re still talking thrash. About the only good thing, short of the huge expense, is that thrash collection on scheduled days are as regular as the sun rising and setting.
Recently, the DENR which monitors compliance with waste management and disposal regulations, has strongly recommended waste-to-energy technology as a viable solution to the worsening garbage problem in the country, especially in urban centers. It minced no words in highlighting the fact that WTE has always been a smart alternative to the traditional sanitary landfill. “Our landfills can only hold so much trash and at a given time, they’ll just cave in. What happened in Payatas can happen anywhere else,” DENR Secretary Roy Cimatu said.
It’s gladdening to note that WTE offers to be a hoped for solution for Baguio’s trash. It may be a pipe dream at the moment, but like all dreams, all we’ve got going is to work for that dream. For now, it’s grin and bear it, hopeful that in the end, we will have minds that are open enough to do the right thing, rather than just bearing it all up, coughing up about a P100 million a year to dump our trash all the way to somewhere far beyond our noses.