Ike Señeres
I LAMENT the fact that many of my environmentalist friends have passed away, and the rest are getting old, but until now, the solid wastes segregation advocacy is still nowhere near successful. More than sixteen years after the “Ecological Solid Waste Management Act of 2000” was signed, we are still not segregating our solid wastes, and we are still dumping them in unsanitary sites much less put them into sanitary landfills. Well, perhaps I should not really expect too much, because many local government officials would not know the difference between dumpsites and landfills, or even care to know what the difference really is. The fact is, dumpsites are already banned, but fully compliant landfills could not be found anywhere either.
While still fighting his war on drugs and crime, President Rodrigo Roa Duterte has already announced that he will run after corruption next, as if he has not done that already. Unlike drugs and crime where there are drug lords and crime lords, there are no real “corruption lords” so to speak, except perhaps the big fish who are caught and who are charged before the Ombudsman. However, it could be said that there is petty corruption everywhere in the government, perhaps in much the same way that there are petty thieves. The comparison could be inexact however, because what we call petty corruption could run up to the billions, up to somewhere below 50 billion wherein it could already be considered plunder.
True to the saying that corruption is everywhere in the government, it is also at the Local Government Units (LGUs), and it could even be worse at that level. There are too many examples that we could cite, but for now, for purposes of this discussion, let us just focus on the corruption that happens in the hauling of garbage from the dumpsites nearby, or even far beyond. Perhaps it is no longer a secret that many mayors actually earn commissions from the hauling of every truckload and not only that, they also earn tipping fees from every truckload that is unloaded into the dumpsites. While that may sound like any other corrupt practice that is too prevalent and therefore too ordinary, it is really more than that because there is a conflict of interest involved.
The conflict of interest is so simple that even a grade one pupil could understand it. Rather than being a play of words, it is actually a play of numbers, a game of additions, because it is obvious that the more truckloads are hauled and tipped, the more money it is for the corrupt mayors. As it is supposed to be, the more solid wastes is segregated, the lesser solid waste there would be to haul. That would however be a game of subtraction that the corrupt mayors would not like, and that is why they would rather play the game of adding to the solid wastes instead. Nicely written and finely worded as the law was passed sixteen years ago, the corrupt mayors have found ways around it.
In theory, Materials Recovery Facilities (MRFs) would have been unnecessary if segregation is done right. That is so because if segregation is done right, there would be nothing left to bring to the MRFs. Stretching this logic further, dumpsites would also be unnecessary, because there would be nothing left to dump if all the materials are fully recovered at the MRFs, assuming that these are not earlier taken out by proper segregation. At the risk of sounding too naive about what is actually happening, I would say that it is actually the duty of the mayors not only to implement segregation laws, but also the laws to build and maintain the MRFs. Sad to say, that is where the conflict of interest lies, because they would obviously not do these things that would lessen their dirty incomes.
After trying for so many years to make segregation work, perhaps it is time now to try other ways, perhaps other ways that could circumvent the corruption that is now happening in the LGUs. One such way is to re-invent the entire supply chain so that it becomes a livelihood program for the needy people of the towns and cities. The way to do that is to get the cooperatives involved, after all there is always one in every locality. As a matter of fact, there could be one cooperative in every barangay that could buy all the recyclables and sell these at a profit. In order to circumvent the racket of the corrupt Mayors, these cooperatives could even have their own trucks that would pick up the recyclables.
It could just be a matter of semantics or perhaps it could just be another play of words, but recyclables are neither garbage nor trash. Anything that is recyclable has value and that is why it is not garbage, because garbage has no value. For that matter, it could be said that the real garbage is whatever that is left after segregating the recyclables. It could also be said that if we are unable to muster the political will to comply with the solid waste laws, we should instead turn to the profit motive, and that is to earn money from recyclables. Moreover, if the environment advocacy is not enough for us, then perhaps the creation of livelihood could be a more attractive goal.
E-mail: iseneres@yahoo.com
