Tarlac gov offers P1M to stop dumping of Canadian trash

TRASHY BUSINESS. Heavy equipment is used to unload freight boxes containing trash from Canada at a sanitary landfill of Metro Clark Waste Management Corp. in Capas, Tarlac province. PHOTO COURTESY OF MCWMC

CITY OF SAN FERNANDO—Tarlac Gov. Victor Yap has offered to pay a Capas landfill up to P1 million to make up for losses if it turns down proposals to bury the remaining Canadian trash sealed in 29 container vans.

Yap made the offer in a July 22 letter to Clark Development Corp. (CDC), the owner of the land at Sitio Kalangitan in Barangay Cutcut II in Capas, Tarlac, which it bid out for a sanitary landfill project in 2000.

The Metro Clark Waste Management Corp. (MCWMC), which was formed by a German consortium that won the bid, developed and operated the landfill where Canadian trash was buried early this month.

In a July 16 hearing initiated by provincial board, MCWMC president and chief executive officer, Rufo Colayco, announced that his company was not completing the disposal contract by sending back the eight container vans delivered there on July 15 and refusing to accept 21 more vans.

When asked by Vice Gov. Enrique Cojuangco Jr. during the hearing on the Canadian trash dumping, Colayco said the contract cost his company about P1 million.

“Since Mr. Colayco has told the [provincial board] that the contract to accept 55 containers of trash is P1 million, I propose to pay the same to MCWMC, the [Environmental Management Bureau] and the [Bureau of Customs] and help ship out and away this garbage from the province of Tarlac,” said Yap in a July 22 letter to CDC president Arthur Tugade.

Yap said the amount is going to be taken from funds intended for emergency expenditures in the provincial budget with the provincial board’s approval.

The same letter was transmitted to MCWMC but Colayco declined to comment on the governor’s proposal on Saturday, saying he had not received the letter yet.

The amount Yap offered is equivalent to the P1 million disposal contract that was charged to the shipping company, Le Soleil, local representative of international firm, Zim, which owns the 55 container vans.

To stop new attempts to dispose of the garbage in Tarlac, Yap also signed two provincial board resolutions that barred the Capas landfill and other parts of Tarlac from receiving foreign wastes.

Resolution 056-2015 sought the “immediate rescission or cancellation of the contract between the BoC (Bureau of Customs) and MCWMC relative to the dumping of the garbage from Canada in the Kalangitan sanitary landfill in Capas, Tarlac.”

It said that the disposal of trash from 26 container vans from June 25 to July 8 violated Resolutions 023-2002 and 108-2003 that allowed MCWMC to accept only wastes from Tarlac, Clark Special Economic Zone (now Clark Freeport) and other cities and towns, including Metro Manila.

Resolution 057-2015 banned the dumping of any garbage from foreign origin in the Kalangitan sanitary landfill and elsewhere in Tarlac.

“Any Filipino should and would do what we did. Let’s keep it simple, it’s just wrong to allow waste or garbage of foreign origin, be it toxic or nontoxic, to be dumped anywhere in the Philippines,” Cojuangco said.

The provincial board cited a provision in the 1987 Constitution which says that “the state is duty-bound to protect the right of the people to a balanced and healthful ecology.”

Colayco said MCWMC accepted the trash because the Environmental Management Bureau of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources certified these to be “municipal solid wastes.”

MCWMC, he said, found no toxic or hazardous wastes in the 26 container vans.