Tuesday, April 24, 2007 Require hospitals to treat wastes, councilor tells DENR
CEBU City Councilor Nestor Archival wants the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) to require all hospitals to have its own waste treatment facility before it issues an environmental compliance certificate.
Archival said yesterday he was surprised that Pollution Abatement Systems Specialists (Pass) Inc. announced its decisions to shut down their operations by July. He said the City Government was not informed about it.
“We should ask the hospitals to have their own facility, as provided for in the law. It appears that DENR and the City Government is not very strict on this,” he told Sun.Star Cebu.
Pass Inc. runs the only hospital waste treatment facility in Cebu. They serve various private and government-owned hospitals.
Without Pass Inc.’s facility, the hospitals will just have to treat its own waste before disposing of these, said Archival.
“DENR should find a way that these hospitals follow the law. If they don’t have the means to treat their waste, then DENR should tell them to hire the services of Pass,” he said.
During their meeting with Pass Inc. officers earlier this year, Archival said the owners wanted the city officials to lobby with hospital owners for them to avail themselves of Pass services.
But the councilor said they could not lobby for their services because they will be accused of promoting the monopoly of the service.
Antonio Tompar of Pass said the financial losses they have incurred in the last three years forced them to decide to shut down, even if they are still serving some hospitals.
Pass Inc. has an operational cost of P300,000 a month but only collects P130,000 to P150,000 from its clients.
Tompar said that when they started preparing to operate the facility in 2001, DENR and the Department of Health (DOH) told them that there was about 7,600 kilos of hospital wastes to be treated in Cebu every day.
But since they began operations in 2003, they have only been treating 100 kilos of hospital wastes a day.
Regardless of the volume of waste, Pass Inc. has to run its autoclave machine on a daily basis, which has a 2,000-kilo capacity.
Their 1.5-tonner refrigerated van is also underutilized. (LCR)
