Baguio speeds up plans for new dump after mishap

BAGUIO CITY—The city government is speeding up plans to develop a site devoted to solid waste management, aiming to operate it by June so it can stop the hauling of the city’s trash to a commercial landfill in Pangasinan province, a city official said.

On Monday, an employee of Camilo Hauling Services Inc., a commercial garbage hauler, died when a truck shipping 15 tons of garbage to Urdaneta City lost its brakes and rolled over on Marcos Highway in Tuba town in Benguet province.

The truck’s driver survived but is in critical condition, said Romeo Concio, city general services officer.

Concio said his office spent half a day to clear the section of the highway of garbage.

“We need to start the project soon so we can stop hauling, especially after the Jan. 27 accident revealed that this manner of managing our garbage has risks,” Concio said.

The city government has been spending up to P200 million yearly to ship wastes to commercial landfills in Tarlac and Pangasinan provinces.

The city began shipping its garbage after its open dump in Barangay Irisan collapsed on Aug. 27, 2011. The accident killed six people and polluted the waterways of Tuba and the downstream communities of Aringay town in La Union province.

Concio said Baguio’s solid waste technopark project was awaiting the passage of the city’s 2014 budget to enable the city government to buy a

22-hectare lot in a neighboring Benguet town.

The property had been cleared for the project by the Mines and Geosciences Bureau.

It would house an integrated waste processing facility, composed of the city’s two Japanese-made machines that convert organic wastes into powdered fertilizer and a waste-to-energy machine that would be augmented by a biogas converter.

The area would also include an ecological sanitary landfill, Concio said, but waste storage there would be temporary since garbage would be processed to generate energy or converted into fertilizer.

The project may cost the city up to P40 million and should be operational by June, if the council passes the budget early, he said.

He said the project had been evaluated by the National Economic and Development Authority as a facility that could help BLISTT (the acronym stands for Baguio and the Benguet towns of La Trinidad, Itogon, Sablan, Tuba and Tublay).

BLISTT was an advocacy started shortly after the 1990 Luzon earthquake to relocate Baguio’s suburban areas and portions of its business center to the Benguet towns to help decongest the summer capital.

BLISTT had since been redeveloped as a multilateral cooperation movement to address common problems like traffic, water resource sharing and waste management. Vincent Cabreza, Inquirer Northern Luzon