I am always excited when I gear up to go snorkeling. In the past couple of years, we have often been in the beach in Matabungkay, where it’s a real daily pleasure (plus exercise) doing up to two to three kilometers’ length of a swim.

Under the liquid embrace of the ocean’s expanse, I enter the world of the silent poet, magical, where time stops and I enter meditation and inspiration. Beneath the waves, corals bloom their intricate forms weaving tapestries of life — soft pinks, fiery oranges and deep purples in conversation with the darting fish and drifting plankton. Inspired, yet I always tell myself — why bother to even paint what I see when they are all so perfect already?

Time always slows, as I become one with the sea, floating with the moon-pulled currents until I get rudely pulled away from my dreamy reverie by plastic bottles! And this is where it hurts, deep in the heart, for the garbage we dump on the planet. The ocean, once a giver of life, now swallows our refuse, its waves coughing up the remnants of our human recklessness and unconsciousness. Even walks through the mangroves or beach fronts sometimes depress me because so much plastic is washed to the shores.

Our widespread culture of sachet purchases by millions in poverty multiply these plastics that inevitably end up in the ocean/seas. From small waterways of urban areas, or cruise ships that ply the waters, plastic finds its way out to the open sea. A chain reaction happens: coral life at high risk of contracting diseases (data shows 89 percent more risk of this today due to the spread of pathogens); the disruption of the marine ecosystems, with sea animals consuming microplastics. The karmic turn is that the fish and marine life come back to us as seafood. And we begin to kill ourselves slowly but surely.

Tourism campaigns highlight the 7,600 archipelago and the beauty of our natural resources. But the shadow fact is that the Philippines is on record (in 2019) as having had the largest share of global plastic waste discarded in the ocean. The country was responsible for 36.38 percent of global oceanic plastic waste, far more than the second-largest plastic polluter, India, which in the same year accounted for about 12.92 percent of the total. Today, the Philippines is rank the third from the top with 2.7 metric tons of plastic wastes every year. I got this ranking recently whey I sat through a forum discussion on Republic Act 11898 which institutionalized (in 2022) the Extended Producers Responsibility on Plastic Packaging Waste. The EPR Law shift the responsibility to the producers requiring them to be environmentally responsible throughout the lifecycle of a product, especially its post-consumer or end-of-life stage. All this in alignment with the hoped for circular economy.

The EPR Forum was hosted by the ECCP (European Chamber of Commerce) bringing stakeholders together from business, the academe and international groups — all sustainability advocates, for sure.