TACLOBAN CITY, Philippines—In Tabon-tabon, a poor town in Leyte, if it’s plastic, it’s legal tender.

The town’s government started accepting plastics as payment for services, food or as barter item for financial aid in a bid to promote its recycling campaign.

Rustico Balderian, mayor of the fifth class municipality about 30 km south of here, said the town government started accepting clean plastic materials in March 2009 as payment for services from the municipal government.

Plastics such as bottles, sachets, broken parts of chairs and others are accepted as payment by the town.

If a resident has a kilogram of clean plastic materials, he could exchange this with medicines or a kilogram of rice.

Licenses, permits

Plastics, according to the mayor, are also accepted as payment for marriage licenses or business permits. Residents needing an ambulance may pay for the service with a kilogram of plastic. The use of an ambulance would otherwise cost a resident P300 for its fuel load.

The municipal government, according to Balderian, also dropped its program of dole to poor residents.

Now, any resident in need of cash may bring used plastic for cash. A kilogram of used plastic would fetch P300; 2 kg, P500; and 3 kg, P1,000.

Balderian recalled that the scheme was used in the recent boxing match of Manny Pacquiao. Residents who wanted to see the live broadcast of the fight were asked to pay in used plastics—2 kg for front seats and 1 kg for other seats.

The mayor said the recycling program worked wonders as residents learned to segregate plastics from their daily trash.

He said it also weaned away some residents from resorting to stealing during lean months—July to August—when there’s no work to do in the farms as harvests are over.

Plastic savings

Husbands who have pregnant wives start saving early clean plastic materials so they would not pay in cash for the diesel of the ambulance.

As in all programs, however, there’s a downside to Balderian’s recycling campaign.

“There is now a shortage of plastic materials in town,” Balderian said in an interview Sunday in his hometown.

The used plastics are turned into bags, slippers, bricks and tiles that are sold in markets outside town.

“This provides income to the municipality and jobs to some of our people,” said the mayor.

Workers in three-wheeled vehicles, known in the town as “pogpog,” collect the used plastics.

They are brought to a facility in the town that has a shredder, a boiler and a bioreactor (some sort of a machine) that process garbage, including the used plastic.

Aside from making recycled products, the town also produces fertilizer from organic trash that it sells for P5 per kg.

Balderian said he presented his town’s solid waste management program at the “Zero Basura” caravan held in this city last week and was attended by town mayors in the region.

“Many of them want to replicate it in their towns,” he said. Vicente Labro, Inquirer Visayas