Baguio finding ways to cut P200-M trash hauling expenses

TRASH HAUL | Personnel of Baguio City’s waste management office haul trash that starts piling up at a collection point on Session Road. The volume of garbage in the city grows due to the influx of visitors. (File photo by VINCENT CABREZA / Inquirer Northern Luzon)

BAGUIO CITY, Benguet, Philippines — With tourism finally surging again, the local government is working out a long-term solid waste management plan to stop its “fiscal bleeding” because it spends P200 million yearly to bring trash to sanitary landfills outside the city.

“The trajectory of the growth of Baguio garbage will always go upwards” because it is a top tourist destination as well as a financial and education hub, said Eugene Buyuccan, a government accountant and head of the Office of General Services, during this week’s city council session on Monday.

Last year, trash shipped out each day to a landfill in Capas, Tarlac, cost Baguio P186.5 million, Buyuccan told the council to establish the “magnitude of waste management expenses that can never be recovered.”

Baguio’s population of 366,358 throws out about 400 tons of trash that include recyclables and kitchen waste, according to records. The garbage generated by 500,000 visitors in December alone added to the city’s average of 140 tons of residual trash sent out to the Tarlac landfill.

Each Baguio resident or transient generates 1.5 kilos of waste, based on 2016 data, Buyuccan said. He asked for a P30-million allocation to purchase a mechanized sorting machine because volunteer garbage collectors gathered 9,000 tons of recyclables, like soda bottles, last year.

Baguio has been paying landfill operators outside the city since 2012 when its only open dump in Barangay Irisan was ordered shut by the Court of Appeals after it was subjected to a writ of kalikasan.

The dump had been operating since the late 1970s, but it was barricaded by Irisan residents in 2008 who later went to court to stop the Baguio government from using the area. The dump was finally locked down following a 2011 trash slide that killed five people and polluted a community in the Benguet town of Tuba.

According to Buyuccan, the city government may reduce its spending once Urdaneta City in Pangasinan province reopens its rehabilitated and modernized environmental sanitary landfill in February. Urdaneta is the closest landfill serving Baguio but the facility was closed for breaching its capacity in 2021.

Urdaneta is 80 kilometers from Baguio’s garbage transfer station along Marcos Highway, while the Capas landfill is 170 km away. Because of a management deal with Urdaneta, Metro Clark Waste Management Corp., which operates the Capas landfill, also manages the Pangasinan facility, Buyuccan said.

—VINCENT CABREZA