Baguio resumes dumping trash in Clark landfill

CITY OF SAN FERNANDO—The Baguio City government has resumed dumping the city’s trash at the Kalangitan sanitary landfill in Capas, Tarlac, following the August 27 trash slide that killed six people.

The city government began reusing the landfill in a government-owned land inside the Clark Special Economic Zone two days after the slide, Armando Garcia, president of the Metro Clark Waste Management Corp. (MCWMC), said.

Hauling firms that the Baguio government contracted have been bringing in an average of 400 metric tons (MT) of trash daily, Garcia said.

MCWMC records showed the city disposed of a total of 79,485 MT at the landfill from December 2008 to April 2011. Each truck was imposed a fee of P800.

The landfill is some 100 kilometers from Baguio. It was built in 1999 by a German consortium at a cost of $350 million and opened for business in 2002. Aetas consider the site part of their ancestral domain.

Baguio City stopped bringing in garbage when the administration of Mayor Mauricio Domogan bought two composting machines from Japan.

At a volume of 79,485 MT in 38 months, Baguio’s garbage averaged 2,400 MT a month in Kalangitan.

Former Mayor Braulio Yaranon pushed for new, untapped technology to address the city’s garbage problem, including a plant that would convert trash into energy.

Yaranon was the first Baguio mayor to impose a “no segregation, no collection policy” in 2005.

He said segregation was meant to ease the volume of garbage, while the city government struggled to buy a lot for a sanitary landfill to replace its dump in Irisan village.

“Many land owners offered to sell Baguio their property in remote areas and Baguio had no money to buy these lots,” he said.

Yaranon said technology offered by a British group and an American group presented the city “fair options for transforming our daily garbage into thermal energy that could be converted into electricity.”

This initiative was sidelined when the Department of the Interior and Local Government suspended Yaranon until the end of his term for opposing a pay-parking company operating in Baguio.

“When I was suspended, I referred these projects to [my successor, former Mayor Reinaldo Bautista Jr.],” he said.

The dump, however, was forcibly closed by villagers during Bautista’s term in 2008. Caught off guard, with no replacement landfill in place, Bautista was forced to ship out garbage to Tarlac.

“People in Baguio won’t mind paying to solve the garbage problem. But they need to know they are getting good service for these taxes,” Yaranon said. Tonette Orejas, Inquirer Central Luzon, with a report from Vincent Cabreza, Inquirer Northern Luzon