REP. MARK Villar shows visitors, including the Miss Water Lily Festival winners, how to use the pulverizer. Contributed photo
Before a mixed crowd of high school students, the elderly and the disabled, Ma. Lanie Socorro posed a question about garbage.
“If 73 percent of the estimated 5,000 metric tons of Metro Manila’s daily trash is collected by garbage trucks, where does the rest go?” she asked.
The class was silent, though they probably already knew the answer, even when Socorro, assistant principal of Las Piñas Science High School flashed on screen photos of piles of garbage strewn in waterways, roads and other areas.
Apart from reducing the amount of garbage hauled by trucks for disposal, the city’s solid waste management program launched yesterday by Las Piñas Rep. Mark Villar, where Socorro was a speaker, sought to instill the value of recycling to residents, and how they could make money out of it.
In an interview at the sidelines of the program, Villar, who also marked his 33rd birth anniversary yesterday, said that more than the potential income that could be generated from recycled materials, people should also be able to form the habit of getting involved
in taking care of their community.
“We’re putting up recycle kiosks in schools and barangay, so I hope this encourages the community to recycle, said Villar, who admitted that he was more inclined to reusing, while his mother Cynthia, a former congresswoman herself, was partial to developing organic materials into handicrafts.
In her brief lecture, Socorro illustrated the capital’s garbage problem, citing portions of a study done by the National Solid Waste Management Committee Secretariat.
If Metro Manila has a population of about 10 million, and each person produces an average of 500 grams of waste daily, there was roughly about 5,250 metric tons of refuse for collectors to gather, she said.
Around 525 trucks with a maximum daily load of 10 metric tons are needed to haul garbage, Socorro said. The problem was, it appeared that the capital doesn’t have the number of garbage trucks going around Metro Manila, she said.
Villar said he funded the acquisition of a backhoe and trucks to transport recycled material gathered at the kiosks which have five compartments to separate plastic bottles from paper, glass bottles and other materials.
With a truck on standby, the vehicle can go around the city to collect the materials for sale to junk shops.
“It’s better to have incentives because these serve as sources of new income,” he said.
Villar described the equipment donation, which also included a plastic pulverizer, as a “means for people to lead sustainable lives.”
The pulverizer grinds plastic items, including bottles. The end product, fine chips of plastic, can be used as materials for hollow blocks and bricks, he said.
The neophyte lawmaker also inaugurated new facilities at the Las Piñas General Hospital and opened a day-long job fair at a mall in the city with about 1,000 employers shopping around for prospective employees.