Canadian waste: Bamban officials close roads to landfill

CITY OF SAN FERNANDO—Residents opposing the transport of garbage from Canada and other provinces of Luzon to a private sanitary landfill in Tarlac through their hometown of Bamban have called off a protest rally scheduled for Friday after their municipal council ordered the closure of two roads to the facility.

Sergio Calayag, a leader of the Alliance of Concerned Citizens of Bamban (ACCB), said the group canceled the protest after the Bamban council approved on Tuesday an ordinance closing two alternative routes to the 70-hectare sanitary landfill operated by Metro Clark Waste Management Corp. (MCWMC) in Sitio Kalangitan, Barangay Cutcut in neighboring Capas town.

The ordinance will be submitted to Mayor Jose Antonio Feliciano on Monday, Calayag said. The council secretary, Marlyn Pangilinan, could not be reached on Wednesday to confirm this information.

Rufo Colayco, president and chief executive officer of MCWMC, said the company would deal with the issue once the town closes the roads.

What the Tarlac provincial board had banned was the dumping of foreign garbage in Kalangitan and anywhere in the province.

Text messages passed around since Aug. 6 about the rally urged Bamban residents to close the roads, block trucks carrying trash and display placards calling garbage as “poison.”

Feliciano vetoed a similar ordinance in June, saying Tarlac would stink if trash from various towns were not hauled to the landfill.

A night before the July 16 public hearing of the provincial board, the mayor blocked eight container vans filled with trash imported by the firm Chronic Plastics from Canada.

The Bureau of Customs had earlier emptied 26 container vans of Canadian trash in the Kalangitan landfill. Samples of the trash were described by the Environmental Management Bureau as municipal solid wastes.

The alternative roads are located in the sitios of Pagasa and Mainang in the villages of Anupul and San Nicolas, respectively, said Diana Figueroa, president of the Concerned Citizens of Bamban (CCB).

Figueroa said CCB did not organize the planned barricades on roads because aside from lobbying for an ordinance prohibiting the transport of garbage through Bamban, the group has been asking the environment committee of the provincial board to order the closure of MCWMC’s facility.

MCWMC, which built the landfill in 2000, decided to use the Bamban routes after Capas Mayor Antonio Rodriguez demanded shares in proceeds of tipping fees.

Rodriguez told the provincial board that he continued to deny access to MCWMC although Capas had been allowed to dump the town’s wastes in Kalangitan at no cost.

The state-owned Clark Development Corp., which manages Subzone D of the Clark Special Economic Zone, where the landfill operates, has not intervened in the issue of access.

The only time it intervened was when it padlocked the eight container vans filled with Canadian trash in July to ensure that their contents would not be dumped in Kalangitan.