QC gov’t wants to be big-time trash-to-energy producer

Mayor Herbert Bautista: From trash to energy. INQUIRER.net file photo

MANILA, Philippines–The Quezon City government is hoping to become one of the country’s energy producers by turning its trash into treasure.

In his 5th State of the City Address last week, Mayor Herbert Bautista said the city has started taking steps to transform waste into energy.

“It used to be that the nearly 2,000 tons of waste generated [daily] by our residents was simply a huge problem. Now, technology has created a new paradigm for trash. Our waste will soon be our treasure,” Bautista added.

According to him, Asian and European companies have already introduced technologies capable of fully transforming the city’s waste into a power source.

“Quezon City will be an energy producer, possibly capable of producing 36 megawatts of electricity per day for the 2,000 tons of garbage that we collect,” Bautista said.

He cited the city’s “small-scale” moves toward that goal, namely, the city’s biogas emission reduction plant in Payatas, from which the city has sold about P1.2 million worth of electricity to Meralco, and the refuse-derived fuel plant also in Payatas, from which the city has sold more than 15,000 tons of fuel to La Farge cement factories.

“At this time when the Philippine government is worried that this country may be [plunged] into an energy crisis, Quezon City has awakened to the fact that we are sitting on what could be the equivalent of a gold mine,” Bautista said.

The large-scale waste-to-energy project, however, hinges on the release of emission standard guidelines from the Department of Environment and Natural Resources and amendments to the Clean Air Act by Congress.

But Bautista already cited it as a “big-ticket venture” candidate for the city’s private-public partnership agreements to be overseen by a local government corporation, the Quezon City Development Authority, also currently being pushed in Congress.

He unveiled these long-term revenue and job generation plans after noting that a recent Pulse Survey showed that the top concern of residents was employment.

Bautista reported that the city’s Public Employment Services Office assisted 24,718 job seekers, 19,891 of whom were employed, from August 2013 to August this year.