In Bontoc, green police bring order to garbage

Called the green police in that part of Cordillera, they wake up early and proceed at 5 a.m. to the waste collection area at the town market to make sure bags of garbage brought there by residents are properly segregated.

“We leave the collection area when the dump truck leaves with all the garbage and then we prepare to man our stalls in the market,” said Paula Acofo, a 63-year-old volunteer.

It’s a task the women do for an hour every morning in four central villages of Bontoc, partly to address a writ of kalikasan imposed on the town, Acofo said.

Bontoc used to operate an open dump near Chico River until residents of Kalinga province complained to the court about garbage floating near their communities.

Baguio City was slapped with a writ of kalikasan by the Supreme Court in 2012 when its Irisan open dump collapsed on Aug. 27, 2011, spilling trash into a small community in Tuba, Benguet province, killing six people.

Most upland communities are situated on terrain that would not accommodate landfills as prescribed by law, so innovation has been key to solving their waste problems.

Instead of a landfill, Baguio is developing a waste facility combining various technologies that process or convert waste into other forms like electricity, said Romeo Concio, the city general services officer.

The city has been offered space to put up a “waste techno hub” at a former open pit mine in Benguet.

The Department of Environment and Natural Resources understands the difficulty faced by upland towns.

In a speech read for her during an environmental summit held in Baguio on July 28, Environment Secretary Gina Lopez said 55 cases had been filed against local governments which violate the ban on open dumps. But she said she recognized efforts to cope and solve their solid waste management challenges.

Lopez said the 10-year solid waste management plans of Baguio and Tineg town in Abra province had been approved, while those of eight other Abra towns had been “conditionally approved.”

“That is 10 out of a total of 77 local governments in the Cordillera Administrative Region (CAR),” she said.

“In CAR, there are still 13 open dump sites … but these have been closed,” she said. The region has three controlled dump facilities and a sanitary landfill.

Forty-four Cordillera towns have material recovery facilities, which sort recyclables from disposable waste materials, Lopez said.

Technology has provided some of the solutions. University of the Cordilleras, for example, has developed an application for locating suitable landfill areas in mountain communities.

MOUNTAIN Province capital Bontoc shut down this open dump (shown in this 2009 photograph), after Kalinga province complained that the facility was polluting the Chico River. EV ESPIRITU

Cooperation is also an avenue for upland communities. Lamut town in Ifugao province has offered to host an engineered sanitary landfill to serve its adjacent towns of Kiangan, Asipulo, Lagawe, Hingyon and Banaue, according to its mayor, Mariano Buyagawan.

The town ends up addressing waste materials that are flowed down by rivers from its neighbor towns, Buyagawan said. “We already talked to the officials of these towns and most of them want the idea.”

Lamut has an existing controlled dump.

The writ petition in 2014 forced Bontoc to shut down its dump at Calutit village. The municipal government bought a 3-hectare lot for a modified sanitary landfill designed by a Japanese expert.

Arthur Odsey, son of Bontoc Mayor Franklin Odsey, said the project was a scaled-down version of an engineered sanitary landfill, which the town could not afford.

Odsey, who is also the executive assistant to his father, said Bontoc sanitation engineers could collect only 4 cubic meters of biodegradable and residual wastes each day, so a modified landfill for the moment was a practical solution.

The community has explored green waste projects, such as a plan to convert nonbiodegradable garbage like glass into concrete blocks.

Still, Bontoc formed the green police, believing it was up to the people to keep order in waste management, said Teresa Fermin, a 73-year-old volunteer. “The need for strict implementation of waste segregation became urgent when the writ was filed against our town,” she said.