SMC’s landfill grab gets smoked

The fire at the San Miguel Aerocity Inc.-owned Navotas Sanitary Landfill Facility has entered its second week and has become much more than an air pollution and health risk issue across Metro Manila after it broke out on 10 April.

The Department of Public Works and Highways, led by Secretary Vince Dizon, deployed backhoes, bulldozers, and dredgers to Barangay Tanza II, Navotas City on 16 April. Dizon said heavy equipment is expected to gain full access to the area by Saturday to support firefighting operations.

San Miguel Aerocity, a powerful arm of the San Miguel Corporation empire, had long cast its eye on the landfill.

It envisioned a gleaming cloverleaf interchange rising boldly above the old waste mound — a vital artery feeding its grand dream of a New Manila International Airport in Bulacan. The land was perfect, they said in court.

Yet it was a Category 4 sanitary landfill, the highest and most volatile classification under Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) rules.

The Philippine Ecology Systems Corp. (Phileco), the former operator of the landfill, had issued warnings before the Navotas Regional Trial Court, before the city government, and before the DENR. It presented the DENR’s own Safe Closure and Rehabilitation Plan, which they had begun implementing in good faith.

“This is not safe,” their experts pleaded. “The guidelines are clear: you do not simply pave over a sleeping giant like this. Not for at least thirty years of careful post-closure vigilance.”

But San Miguel pressed forward with the aggression of a conqueror.

SMC now owns land

San Miguel Aerocity took legal and physical possession and now Phileco cannot even set foot on the property without trespassing on land now owned and occupied by SMC.

Recently, flames erupted at the very heart of the site Phileco had left pristine and stable. Thick, poisonous smoke rolled across Metro Manila, forcing evacuations, closing schools, and sending families gasping for clean air.

The fire burned for days, a toxic reminder of warnings ignored. And yet, when the smoke finally cleared enough for questions, San Miguel’s response was telling: the liability, they insisted, still belonged to the company they had forcibly removed two months earlier.

But possession is more than nine-tenths of the law — it is also the full weight of environmental accountability.

The fire in Navotas was not an act of God. It was the predictable consequence of prioritizing concrete over caution. SMC had spent years and millions to win the land. They had been warned, in writing and in open proceedings, about exactly what could happen if they rushed development atop a Category 4 landfill. When the flames came, the conglomerate disclaimed responsibility for the very site they had fought so hard to possess.