Failure to collect

Dave Achondo

I FOUND myself in complete dismay yet again because my garbage, along with other people’s trash, were not being collected properly. I do not know what is going on, and we do not know what to follow anymore.

The schedule is just a complete sham, and a complete disarray. When you set it Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, stick with the collection days. Wag absent sa Monday tapos susulpot sa Friday. It should not be like that.

On Monday evening, I went to a garbage bin in Macasandig to check the time and date of collection and read the collection schedules and the corresponding penalties printed on a tarpaulin. It was for me to re-educate myself of their schedules in case there were changes done.

We have been doing a little spring cleaning for my mother’s birthday. All the recyclable junk were sold, and the other residual wastes were neatly kept in a sack to be picked up by our collectors. Sadly, they never came or they didn’t bother to come.

We are currently in our third sack and by the time you read this, we will be up to our fourth one. According to what’s printed on the tarpaulin, residual wastes such as ours would be picked up Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays, between at around 8 am to  5 pm. No one came. Not even our neighbors’ garbage that decorated their gate was picked up — it was just rotting away and creating a nasty stench.

I was given the impression that IPM Construction and Development Corp., the City Local Environment and Natural Resources Office (Clenro) and barangay officials that visited our house a few months ago would improve the garbage collection. They paid us a visit just to check how we were disposing our trash. They do collect, but not all the time. If only they regularly collect and follow the schedule, then my neighbors’ garbage near their gate would not be rotting and saluting our nostrils with terrible stench.

So what’s the plan? Do we just burn all these trash so that there is no need to for them to collect? But I’ll be breaking a law.

Today, we will place all of our sacks of garbage outside our gate with this sign: “Residual waste ko, punita ko” (all caps para intense). We don’t have to fear anything because there are no harmful chemicals in the sacks. Neither is there anything in the sacks worth salvaging by scrap collectors. We will do it just to see whether or not the collectors would come by and pick them up. If nobody comes, it doesn’t matter. I’ll just leave them to rot outside my gate.

To the barangay officials in charge of collecting garbage, could you please collect them, segregated or not, and start imposing your fines so that residents in your respective barangays would follow. There’s no point in warning people of fines if no one gets fined.