GUIGUINTO, Bulacan--A barangay (village) here has made a clean break from its filthy past and has transformed itself into an eco-friendly hub.

In a province that is home to two of the world's most polluted places, Barangay Tuktukan with a population of 12,000 people, has established itself as an efficient, eco-friendly center of solid waste management.

Since getting a dumpsite shut down in 2004, the officials and residents have been composting their wastes, and turning them into fertilizer for sale to rice farmers.

"This has worked wonders for the people because it has tremendously reduced the garbage in the village," says Tuktukan barangay chair Romeo Tonog, who is in charge of the ecology center here.

Award-winning
After the biodegrable trash is segregated from the nonbiodegrable trash at homes and collected for composting at the ecology center, only a small volume of plastic items is left to be recycled, he says.

This is in stark contrast to Meycauayan City and Marilao town, recently named two of the "worst polluted places" by the Blacksmith Institute. This is a New York City-based organization supporting pollution-related environmental projects. One such project is the Polluted Places Initiative, which identifies polluted sites throughout the world by means of an online nomination process.

Not surprisingly, Barangay Tuktukan has drawn visits from nearby town officials who are looking for ways to end their garbage woes. It also won an award, Gawad Galing Barangay, in 2005 from the Bulacan provincial government.

Ecology center
The hub of the barangay's solid waste management program is a roofed, warehouse-like ecology center that sits on a 250-square-meter lot in the middle of a ricefield built with local government funds.

Here, some 600 kilograms of biodegradable garbage collected from homes by "eco-boys" in pedicabs (bicycles with a side car) are dumped every day for composting. Nonbiodegradable items are sold by residents to junk shops.

Another team of workers mix the pile of fruit and vegetable peelings, fish and animal innards, and food leavings with a sack of coconut dust. The pile is left alone to decompose for 25 to 28 days.

The result is an odorless, finely textured fertilizer that is sold P10 per kg to vegetable and rice farmers, not only in Tuktukan but in nearby barangay and towns.

Lessons for Manila
A farmer, who has taken up organic farming, has bought 50 sacks of the fertilizer at P100 per sack for his 3.2-ha ricefield in San Rafael town, also in Bulacan.

The fertilizer has also been given away for free, and has ended up in a vegetable patch in a public elementary school across the barangay hall, where the produce are cooked at lunch and served to malnourished pupils.

So far, the barangay has been earning a net income of P2,500 a month from the sales, an amount that goes to the payment of salaries of the center's personnel and maintenance of the pedicabs, among others.

"If the local government is really determined, it can be done," Tonog says.

Indeed, Barangay Tuktukan can teach a thing or two on solid waste management to residents of Metro Manila, or elsewhere who still rely on garbage trucks to pick up their trash and dump them somewhere else.

Bangon Kalikasan
Tuktukan's transformation did not happen overnight.

Getting the municipal dumpsite in their barangay closed down was tough enough. Weaning the residents off the bad habit of just throwing away their bag of garbage onto the front yard was even tougher.

For years, the dumpsite along McArthur Highway had been a bane for the residents. The stench of stinking garbage filled the air and made people sick. Its proximity led to the closure of a commercial establishment across it.

After receiving a complaint about the stink, Bangon Kalikasan (Arise Nature), an environmental nongovernment organization, helped the residents and officials lobby with then Environment Secretary Elisea Gozun, Bulacan Gov. Josefina de la Cruz and then Guiguinto Mayor Ambrosio Cruz Jr. to shut down the dumpsite. They succeeded in August 2004.

The former dumpsite, which is on a 3-hectare property, is now overrun with weeds.

Then came an agreement between the Bangon Kalikasan, residents and officials to adopt an ecological resource management in Guiguinto, and put up ecology centers in the barangay. Tuktukan was the first to embrace it.

Start at home
"Our group believes that an ecology center will never succeed if there's a dumpsite," Bangon Kalikasan president Joey Papa says. "Besides, a garbage truck scatters bacteria as it goes around a barangay."

The next step for the NGO was to orient municipal and barangay officials on segregation, composting and recycling, and their beneficial effects in helping cut down carbon dioxide emissions.

"We taught them [why it was important to recycle]--from the values of waste management to global warming. We made them understand what a barangay can do to help reduce carbon dioxide emissions," Papa recalls.

"The best practice is house segregation, composting and recycling. If the trash is managed at home, there won't be any waste to bring out. Zero waste, that's the goal of the Zero Waste Society," he adds.

Good example
But when the time came for barangay officials to start segregating their waste, there was resistance.

"We taught the mothers to take care of segregating the household trash. Some were angry. Some even threatened, 'Sir, we won't vote for you the next time around,'" narrates Togon, who gained a fresh term in late October's barangay elections.

"Eventually they got used to the system. It can be done if there's a consensus among residents, but it's important that the municipal or provincial government lead the way," he adds.

At least three other barangay in Guiguinto have followed Tuktukan's example, and have gone a step further: They're now using composting equipment.