NEWSFLASH

Manila, Aug. 13, 2000 - The Payatas tragedy is a loud and clear wake-up call on the government about Metro Manila's mounting, smoldering garbage crisis. Payatas is even worse than Tondo's Smokey Mountain which gained international notoriety for the country. The crisis is now a too pervasive enormity for anybody to hide, ignore or run away from. It stares us in the face at street corners or on street islands, in neighborhood dumps and swollen creeks -- assailing our nostrils, polluting our waters and poisoning our bodies in every way.

For years, the government's response has been to downsize the problem, almost shrugging it off as if everything were normal or, in official parlance, "under control."

Beyond resulting in lives maimed and killed or still buried alive under tons of garbage, and prompting government efforts to relocate the safer grounds the squatters still living and scavenging in the new Smokey Mountain, the tragedy exposes as never before the government's pathetic, primitive and criminal neglect of the waste problem.

The modern solution is here

Practically nobody is talking about it, but the Philippine government has an existing perfected contract with a foreign consortium for installing a state-of-the-art integrated waste management project for Metro Manila. In fact, the Regional Trial Court at Pasig City recently ruled that the government must respect the perfected contract and prohibited the government from entering into a new waste management contract.

Thus, the opportunity for solving the garbage crisis was presented as early as three years ago. The option is still there. With the support of one of Europe's leading waste management firms and the financial backing of an international financial institution, the consortium would build the facilities at no expense to government and operate them even at less than what local governments are now spending to dump their wastes into the San Mateo, landfill or any other landfill.

Under the project, the garbage would undergo segregation and recycling or composting, while the inert, harmless processed residues would be dumped into the landfill, the final stage of disposal. What's more, a waste-to-energy facility would be installed to generate power for community or industrial use to save precious dollars on imported crude oil.

Gov't's wishy-washy approach

Despite all this, however, the government's approach to the crisis has been a wishy-washy formula calling for formation of so-called kariton brigades of poor kids to do the chore of collecting recyclable refuse items, the adoption of a simple-minded landfill policy, and other disparate primal ideas -- all ignoring modern technology as a means of coping with the problem.

"There is no money in garbage" was how Marikina City Mayor Bayani "BF" Fernando summed up his stand against the propaganda line that there is pera sa basura that merely encourages the poor -- the scavengers -- to make a living out of sorting and collecting garbage. Only sickness and death, added a newsman who heard BF's admonition. BF's advise: "Let the big companies make business out of garbage, but never, never encourage the poorest of the poor to survive on the garbage they collect. On the contrary, government should wean the poor away from the garbage dumps for their own good."

Yes, there must be better and modern ways of approaching the metropolis' grave waste problem. Elsewhere in the world, especially in Europe, the United States and even in certain advanced countries of Asia, governments, communities, environmentalists and the waste management sector have adopted modern state-of-the-art technologies to cope with their wastes. And they're succeeding in coping with the problem and in providing convenience and protection to the public.

In contrast, in the Philippines, the solution to the crisis appears to have eluded the authorities. The evidence is that the solution has been simply ignored even by the best of government minds in the past few years.

Simple-minded landfill policy

As a result, the government is now caught in a serious bind of its own doing. Pressured by Antipolo City and San Mateo townsfolk opposing its continued operation, the San Mateo landfill will close at year's end. Earlier, the Carmona "landfill" in Cavite had been declared off-limits. Despite the court prohibition against any new waste management contract, the government has just accepted proposals from private parties in a public bidding on a "sanitary" landfill project to be built elsewhere to cater to the Metro Manila garbage. Under present plans, the proposed landfill will accept only 2,000 tons of solid municipal waste everyday. The idea is not to over-dump in the new landfill so it won't be filled up in four or five years. Yes, a backward landfill policy will force government to continue building more and more landfills until God's Armageddon. Landfills, despite the gag tag "sanitary", have been proved by international studies to be harmful to the environment and the health of the communities hosting them.

The 2,000 tons to be accommodated every day at the new landfill is only one-third of what the "garbage czars" themselves insist is the 6,000 tons of daily waste production of the country's largest concentration of residents estimated at some 10 million, and center of trade and commerce.

What about hazardous wastes?

Thus, largely ignored or unknown to them is another reality. On top of the solid municipal waste or garbage from households which amount to a daily output of more than 9,000 tons, according to other quarters, are the more than 10,000 tons of daily wastes, mostly hazardous, from the industrial, commercial, and the pharmaceutical and hospital sectors. Based on this estimate, Metro Manila's daily turnout is some 19,000 tons of wastes. Why doesn't government, for a change, face up to the crisis?

Publicity-seeking politicians in Congress, in their ivory tower, delude themselves if they really think they could solve problems by merely passing any law. To the applause of those who call themselves environmentalists led by an internationally funded lobby group, they banned incineration as a means of disposing of wastes. Let's clean the air we breathe, never mind if we get buried under mountains of garbage. The Philippines has become the only country in the world, they proudly proclaim, imposing a total ban on incineration of waste.

But in spite of their public pronouncements, an examination of the Clean Air Act, the very law that they approved, will show that it actually laid down specific standards for acceptable toxics or fumes from stationary source in accordance with World Health Organization standards. How in the world could Congress ban incineration or the burning of waste but in the same breath allow some amounts of fumes or toxics to arise? That's the Pinoy to you! At any rate, the official line is that incineration is the work of the Devil himself, and so it's outlawed. The law, however, contradicts itself by expressly allowing one's neighbors to burn their rubbish and barangay officials to make bonfires out of rotting garbage or other material. And the statue had the gall to call these practices traditional community activities!