After Baguio dump collapse, trash piles remain

The city government has yet to finish clearing the garbage that littered a mountainside community on Asin Road here and villages in neighboring Tuba, Benguet, after its decommissioned dump in Barangay (village) Irisan collapsed during a storm on August 27.

Cordelia Lacsamana, Baguio environment officer, said work crews had cleaned up 75 percent of the trash slide. This represents approximately 15,000 metric tons of trash that have been hauled off to a commercial landfill, said city engineer Leo Bernardez, who supervised the clearing operations.

Lacsamana said the garbage piles left had been contracted out to a private firm. The remaining piles were perched near crevices of the mountain of trash and would require delicate machine work to move these to trucks for hauling to a landfill in Tarlac, he said.

Because the government had been focused on the trash slide, Lacsamana said the city’s solid waste team was being augmented by a Japanese-owned firm which has been collecting Baguio’s plastic wastes.

Trucks manned by workers of ProTech Machinery Corp. have joined garbage collectors who pick up trash from 128 barangays because of a supply deal that requires the firm to collect all of the city’s nonbiodegradable wastes.

Materials recovery facility

ProTech supplied Baguio with two machines that use an enzyme to convert organic wastes into fertilizer. It has been developing a property in Rosario, La Union, for a manufacturing plant that would convert plastic wastes into pellets for export to plastic furniture factories in China, said Luis Arqueza Lu Jr., ProTech vice president, in a September news conference.

Lu said ProTech operates a materials recovery facility in Rosario, La Union.

The company has been using a Rosario farm lot as a segregation area where workers separate recyclable trash from plastics, Lacsamana said.

“When Lu reported these developments to us, ProTech assured us it has secured all the legal and environmental permits,” she said.

One of the permit is a “certificate of noncoverage,” a document issued in lieu of an environmental compliance certificate to signify that a project or enterprise being used in an area poses no serious environmental risk.

“The area [Protech uses in Rosario] was never meant for dumping and they followed all the safety and health protocols required,” Lacsamana said.

But the city government has started investigating reports that Sison town in Pangasinan has been upset by garbage dumping at a village in nearby Rosario.

Last week, residents of three villages in Sison prevented 10 dump trucks from unloading trash on a private farm lot in neighboring Barangay Nancamotian in Rosario.

Sison Vice Mayor Bensaulozacheus Mariñas said they intervened even though the lot belonged to another town because the stench coming from the property had upset residents of Barangays Binmekeg, Esperanza and Agat.

Protests

He said trucks began unloading garbage on the property on Nov. 18. Sison residents gathered two days later, carrying placards to block the trucks, which were diverted to the bottom of a bridge across the Bued River, Mariñas said.

Sison officials have filed a protest letter addressed to the Department of Environment and Natural Resources after inspecting the farm lot.

Mariñas said the portion of the lot where garbage had been unloaded was enclosed by sawali (woven bamboo strips).

He said the municipality had not yet discussed the matter with Rosario officials. But Sison officials are working under the assumption that the truckloads of waste came from Baguio City and not from San Fernando City in La Union.

Adamor Dagang, La Union information officer, said San Fernando operates its own sanitary landfill.

Small towns produce only about two truckloads of wastes daily that suggests that other La Union towns could not have generated the volume of trash unloaded on the Nancamotian property, he said. Reports from Vincent Cabreza and Yolanda Sotelo, Inquirer Northern Luzon