Garbage woes

Garbage woes | Daily Tribune

Shown the terrible sight, a visibly dismayed Public Works chief Vince Dizon could only mutter to himself that Metro Manila has a “garbage crisis.”

Similarly, on seeing the sea of garbage, the usually breezy Metropolitan Manila Development Authority (MMDA) General Manager Nicolas Torre III could do no better than wear his frustration on his sleeve.

“Enforcement? Mas mabigat na multa (more severe penalties)? CCTV? Community accountability? Incentives? Makikinig ako (I’ll listen). Pero isang bagay ang sigurado: hindi puedeng ganito na lang palagi (One thing is sure: we can’t always have this),” he stressed.

Torre had reason for his frustration. Last May, he said that despite collecting nearly 7,000 tons of garbage from waterways and another 5,000 tons from pumping stations, the MMDA still couldn’t do anything about the practice of people openly throwing their waste into Metro Manila’s narrowed rivers and esteros.

By all accounts, Metro Manila generates the most garbage in the country, about 25 percent. But only 85 percent of that total waste is collected and disposed of at its three authorized sanitary landfills, with the remaining 15 percent dumped into waterways; thereby making the case that many Metro Manila residents either don’t throw their trash correctly or their garbage isn’t properly collected.

By last Thursday, the authorities had managed to clear the Redemptorist channel, hauling off a hundred truckloads of trash.

The scramble to clear waterways, however, raised an intriguing question: In confronting flooding, are we spending too much time scrutinizing flawed and corrupted flood control projects when collecting garbage is another big issue we’ve ignored? A case of two peas in the same pod.

The point, which bears repeating here, was raised recently by Assistant Ombudsman Jose Dominic F. Clavano IV in his column in the DAILY TRIBUNE.

Clavano wrote: “This is why the Office of the Ombudsman is beginning a systematic review of solid waste management contracts and, just as important, their actual implementation. It is not enough to ask whether a contract was awarded correctly. We intend to check whether the garbage was in fact collected, whether the tonnage billed matches what was hauled, whether the facility being paid for actually functions.”

Systematically reviewing and even cleaning up garbage hauling contracts and the notoriously politically-protected and profit-oriented contracts of sanitary landfills cannot be dispensed with, since, as Clavano said, “Every peso stolen from a hauling contract is garbage left in a canal; every ghost facility is untreated waste in a river; every overpriced dumpsite is a community living beside a hazard it already paid to remove.”