The festival month of January closed with a bang yesterday in Cebu as the last town or barangay based Sinulog festivals were held.
But the amount of garbage collected in the wake of the main Sinulog revelry in Cebu City last Jan. 15 merits comment because waste looks ready to continue to stare the populace in the face the rest of this year.
The trash amounting to 113 tons that workers under the Cebu City Department of Public Services gathered is evidence that much is still wanting in the waste disposal habits of Cebuanos, nearly a year after Mayor Michael Rama first decided to finally shut down the Inayawan Sanitary Landfill and imposed a no waste segregation, no collection policy.
The garbage controversy became more complicated somehow with the relatively small 2012 budget that the City Council allotted for the department: P199.7 million instead of the P321.7 million as DPS head engineer Dionisio Gualiza proposed.
The engineer said this compelled City Hall to shelve plans to buy 20 six-wheeler garbage trucks for the barangays and ten 10-wheeler trucks for the DPS. That would purportedly keep garbage collection a slow and unsteady affair
Rep. Tomas Osmeña of the city’s south district, however, did right in urging Gualiza and the DPS to look into allegations that the prices of spare parts for the garbage trucks have been overpriced.
Perhaps an amount for buying dump trucks more realistic and sensible in the calculations of the councilors can be presented by the DPS when the time comes for the enactment of a supplemental budget.
In the meantime, what about the news of the city’s campaign to educate residents (and by example visitors) to throw garbage at the right places? Behavioral changes due to such education, measured by the garbage that flooded the Sinulog Grand Parade route, appeared negligible.
Those in City Hall’s executive department cannot sit content performing that annual cheap trick of making the voluminous revelers’ dirt vanish before the day breaks post Sinulog—a feat of thoroughness and dispatch sadly not replicated in the barangays in ordinary time, as the burgeoning, stinking piles of uncollected, unsegregated trash in many street sides and alleys show.
Neither should party-goers persist in their careless abandon, paving the asphalt with trash year after year. In fact they should be so zealous about cleanliness from their very homes they would treat thoroughfares as extensions of their living rooms, which, in a correct state of mind they would keep immaculate. (It’s really no sweat making a habit of sticking trash into one’s pocket or lugging it in a bag until one is able to deposit it at the next spacious bin.)
Now whatever happened to the plan to make reusing, recycling and segregating trash a lifestyle? This was supposed to help reduce the amount of garbage up for collection. That the DPS now needs more garbage trucks tells us that eco-friendly waste management is not yet the household culture that it should have turned into ages ago.