THIS is it! This is the day that we dreaded 20 years ago. The day when garbage overtakes the land of the free and careless people.

It is not as if no one saw it coming. There were a great number of councilors who presented smart and practical alternatives to the management of trash. They also prepared for the closure of the Irisan dumpsite way back in 2000. They knew the negative impact of the decades of leacheate that crept down into the Asin River. They knew. We tried to segregate the garbage, beginning in the city market. We tried to build the compost facility and put it to good use. We almost made some sense of this sorting.

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We almost did. We got desperate. We tried to put sorts of sorting in place and threatened not to collect the trash that people mixed. We threatened.

Ten years ago, we campaigned with War on Waste! What a waste! We warred with zero. We zeroed. Laws were passed. They called it the clean air act. They called it the landfill act. They called them fancy things. They called them.

The reality of the garbage churned out by the 300,000 or more senior citizens, adults, adolescents, children, and infants daily are piling up along the streets. They are piling, we are piling. A problem solved by another problem.

Who are we fooling? Fools fooling fools. We don't need to make trash.
Plastics with plastics, paper with paper, glass with glass, tin with tin, biodegradable with biodegradable, each have a place to go. Why can't they go there? We just can't make sense of this? We just can't.

We can only look at Japan and wonder where the discipline to put out garbage in batches comes from. We read about a village making money out of compost from garbage. We see the 10 wheeler trucks pull out of the dumpsite with the tons of plastics and paper, glass and tin.

We see the shanties turn into bungalows or buildings from all this garbage.

What a waste! The real solution is not to generate trash. Live smart, don't buy things packaged in things that can't be recycled. Then you will have no trash.

Recently, we see people making trash out of things we haven't even thrown out. At the cemetery, they've even taken our fences and sold them for scrap. They even plucked out the bronze letters of epitaphs and markers.

Without trash? We can if we want to. Then, there would be no gruel for the hydras. Is this really what we want? There is no WE. Let me begin with I. Many "I" can begin this. I want a world without trash. I will begin with separating my trash and not buying things that can't be recycled.

I will, I want, and I can do this, even for my household.