BAGUIO CITY, Philippines—Residents have launched an online petition to compel the city government to enforce a ban on plastic bags, which should have taken effect in 2012.
Baguio was the subject of a January 2012 writ of kalikasan after its only dump in Barangay (village) Irisan eroded into a neighboring community in Tuba town, Benguet province, in August 2011, forcing the city government to spend up to P200 million in the succeeding years to haul garbage to commercial dumps.
The city has been developing a waste management facility so that collected garbage can instead be stored to fuel a thermal power plant, according to Romeo Concio, the city’s general services officer.
But the petitioners over at www.change.org said waste management could be sped up once the city government “enforces the ban on plastic bags, as mandated by City Ordinance No. 26 that was crafted in 2007.” It said the ordinance “should have taken effect back in 2012.”
“As litter, plastic bags find their way into our waterways, parks and streets, causing floods and preventable casualties during strong rains … The Irisan trash slide in 2009, which claimed six lives, was an avalanche of our accumulated plastic and mixed wastes from more than three decades. The cleanup after the trash slide entailed gathering these plastics once more to dump in Capas, Tarlac,” said the petition.
“This year, the city has budgeted P85 million for hauling and tipping fees to dispose of residual wastes, which are largely composed of disposable plastics. One ton of garbage costs P1,833 for hauling and tipping fees and we spend P232,876 per day to dispose of an average of 127 tons of residual wastes to be transported and dumped in a landfill in Urdaneta City. Such an amount could be better spent on social services that are needed by our citizenry.”
The plastics ban ordinance requires consumers to instead use reusable supermarket bags.
A plastics ban is already being enforced in Bontoc town, the capital of Mt. Province, which was also slapped with a writ of kalikasan in October 2012 because of its open dump that had been operating near the banks of Chico River.
The ban took effect in June 2013.
But there are still no answers as to how the town will address its abandoned dump. The municipal administrator’s office has disclosed plans to convert the dump into an ecopark similar to the program being developed in Irisan.
On Thursday, Oscar Cabanayan, Cordillera director of the Environmental Management Bureau (EMB), said he planned to commission a study to determine whether removing the dump from the river is more cost-effective.
The Bontoc dump is about 100 meters from the riverbanks. A major Cordillera river system, Chico River starts from Mount Data in Mt. Province and traverses the towns of Bauko, Sabangan and Bontoc, as well as communities in Tinglayan and Pasil towns and Tabuk City, the capital of Kalinga province.
The Bontoc dump was decommissioned in August 2013.
In the Benguet capital, La Trinidad town, officials were given until June 30 to repair and fix its engineered sanitary landfill (ESL) in Barangay Alno after the EMB concluded that its operations violated its own environment compliance certificate (ECC).
Cabanayan said the agency had informed the La Trinidad government as early as 2010 about the structural defects in the Alno ESL.
Alno’s most pressing problem at the moment is one of its landfill cells containing garbage that is beyond its carrying capacity, Cabanayan said.
“We need to immediately haul out the garbage and stop dumping to give way to the rehabilitation of the Alno dump,” said La Trinidad Mayor Edna Tabanda.
She said the municipal council had allocated P7.1 million to haul garbage from the Alno dump to commercial landfills in Tarlac or Pangasinan provinces.
La Trinidad produces 93 tons of mixed garbage each day but only 50 tons are hauled to the Alno dump.