URDANETA, Pangasinan – Macario, (real name but surname omitted) a gangly 17 years old kid from this lowland town hefted over his shoulders a plastic sack crammed with odds and ends that have caught his fancy last week at the sanitary landfill in Urdaneta City where Baguio City and Urdaneta Waste Management signed a Memorandum of Agreement in 2019 for disposal of Baguio’s residual waste.
He stood at the edge of the landfill’s staging area and scanned as three garbage trucks just pulled in and began unloading. As the trucks moved off, scores of scavengers slowly gathered round the unloaded trash and began poking into the debris. Macario followed suit. . .
It was in January 11, 2019 when Baguio City government, through former mayor Mauricio Domogan, entered into an agreement with Urdaneta Waste Management to utilize its engineered sanitary landfill to dispose of its residual waste for a period of two years.
Macario and his friends regularly scavenge on the garbage dump where daily, garbage trucks from Baguio’s General Services Office (GSO) disgorge around 188-200 tons of garbage daily.
They dig into the piles of garbage looking for items to sell or use. In the brooding silence of different aroma of surrealistic dump and rotting dunes, they, and others as well, try to find treasure in other people’s trash.
They have been doing this untidy garbage job for how long they could not really care to remember.
Why do pickers return to the dumps? One will realize that this question is never asked from garbage scavengers because the answer is assumed. That is, it’s done out of necessity, as means of survival.
From this perspective, sifting through refuse on a city dump like at Urdaneta sanitary landfill is one income-generating activity among a multitude performed by those who cannot find waged employment.
Garbage dumps thus appear as an end zone in a double understanding: as burial ground for unwanted things and, as the end of the line for the urban poor.
Comings and goings of garbage scavengers at the dumps hardly fit the image of life subsumed by work of subsistence. And yet, pertinacious ideas of informal labor as product of scarcity or a last resort leave less room to inquire why such work is taken up, how it surfaces from social and political angles and how it expresses different visions of what life is for.
Many highlanders, lowlanders and other Filipinos posit there shouldn’t be no rhyme or reason that anybody would want to write about garbage scavengers, let alone share a person’s life in, the ‘garbage business.”
But for these people — garbage collectors and garbage pickers — who have been intimately involved with garbage and helped to create one of the most comprehensive solid-waste management, their story is in fact worth sharing.
Garbage business is what most people assume as the lowest rung on the social ladder of life that few would ever have desire to be associated with it.
Despite that longstanding attitude, garbage is still truly the common denominator of all people in this lowland region, in highland Cordillera Administrative Region (CAR) and other Philippine regions.
Be you rich, poor, a communist, non-communist, capitalist, politician, non-conformist, socialist, centrist, alienist, anarchist, abolitionist, apologist, atheist, antagonist, altruist, activist, bigamist, chauvinist, alarmist, or whatever IST, you still generate garbage – a fact that many don’t acknowledge.
None of the so-called elite – let alone blue collar or white collar workers would ever have any desire to be associated with basura. That few people admit they produce garbage but worse, they do not pay to get rid of it.
Until recently in the course of past years, people, reluctantly, began to admit that they were the ones creating the basura that part and parcel, threatens the environment. And over the source of those years, the terms ecology, environment, environmentalist, preservation, re-use, recycle, environmental impact, among others were heard.
That response brought some reality to the newly created environmental movement. Environmental issues were now seeping to the general public’s attention as well as businesses and the higher rungs of the social ladder.
They had never envisioned themselves being associated with garbage but now they realized it was in fact a multi-million-peso industry, with trucks, facilities, property, landfills, databases, offering money opportunities.
But for the people in the dumps like those scrounging at Urdaneta Landfill, in a world where many work traditional jobs, these garbage scavengers sift through mounds of trash they can collect to sell rather than opt on a path for a life of crime.
They, in fact, provide a public service but are not paid for it; they help on combatting climate change. These informal waste pickers work a precarious job, exposed to unstable income and a lack of social protection.
Asked if the Baguio garbage being disposed at the Urdaneta dumpsite became lesser because of what was recently espoused by no less than Baguio City mayor Benjamin Magalong that total garbage collection slipped to 50 tons less due to what was termed as circular economy, the gang of male scavengers grinned amiably and punched each other at the ribs.
Then one of youth pointed his two fingers at his eyes, (the gesture meaning “We see with our own eyes”) and said, “Kasla parehas met ti bulto ti basura nga magapgapu idiay Baguio. Idi Christmas tupay ket pirme ti basura nga nahakot ti GSO.”
(The way we look at it; it seems the bulk of garbage coming from Baguio City remains the same. In fact, last Christmas Christmas, the garbage hauled by GSO was more).
Baguio City councilor Betty L. Tabanda, committee on health and environment head, earlier observed how “more basura warriors” are joining and contributing in the campaign to reduce, reuse, recycle and repurpose garbage.
A circular economy taps on community-led initiatives to lengthen lifespan of consumed products. On the garbage side, the initiative requires recycling or remanufacturing household waste that can be integrated into the supply belt.
A study accepted last year by Benguet State University’s (BSU) Mountain Journal of Science and Interdisciplinary Research, conducted by Thalia Marie T. Estonanto of the Department of Education of Dona Aurora National High School, Baguio City and titled, “Life in the Dumps: Experiences of Garbage Collectors at Irisan Dumpsite, Baguio City,” examined the often overlooked lives of garbage collectors in the city’s waste management system.
In the study of Estonanto, it offers a rare insight how dirty work of garbage collection have generally received minimal attention and the practitioners of this occupation virtually unknown. People pay little attention to them and avoid the topic, garbage.
After all, who likes to take out from the house, the garbage? If no one likes to take out the garbage, then no one is particularly interested to do anything with the mess. Oh, yes ecology is a fine topic, but garbage . . .?
Still, if residents try to shut themselves off from this basic, integral and complicated part of society, people lose the chance to learn about their own ways of life, the study predicated.
And ways of life depend upon various practitioners who the dirty work. Work that are basic to the services that a complex industrial society depends upon, like in hospitals, on the streets, in slaughterhouses, in factories, on the farms and in alleyways, gutters and dark corners.
Society expects garbage dirty work to be done but it doesn’t recognize its full costs. There are human costs in garbage work for the persons who perform it.
As Estonanto stated in her study: “Waste collectors encounter physical and mental challenges in health risks. It involves risky items, occupational stress and emotional anguish.” This description emphasizes job hazards and their practicality.
When one is engaged in work that other consider demeaning, it’s bound to have an effect upon the way garbage collectors interact with others as the study noted that in the case of Baguio garbage collectors, personal methods help them manage stress and health.
Respondents in the study explained to Estonanto that if a garbage man feels stigmatized by his dirty work occupation, humanly, his eyes may show it, he becomes a non-person and passersby ignore him because he makes sure they do.
The departures and returns of garbage collectors to the dumps coheres within the trajectory of life that they live. With the scavengers, they weave together life and labor, value and waste, the city and its margins in ways the study sought to understand.
In the case of garbage collectors, which may as well be the case for scavengers, the study is a critique of scarcity as a persistent paradigm for understanding lives lived in a precarious condition. To see their work forecloses a most important statement as carried in the lyrics of a song titled “Montanosa a Nagan, ili a Kaigorotan.”
And it says in the lyrics, “Ngem awan kanu serbi ti Baguio, nu awan ti basurero.” Their work shapes and is shaped by the political life of Baguio City.
There are around eighty plus city paid garbage collectors in Baguio but are outnumbered by volunteer garbage collectors who ride on garbage trucks to help in hauling of refuse. These volunteers sift through the piles while the truck is on motion to other designated collection areas around Baguio.
These volunteers have the first opportunity to grab whatever they can from the loaded piles. Whatever is left or missed by the Baguio volunteers, scavengers at Urdaneta sanitary landfill possess it as their share. And the cycle of life at the dumps goes on.
