Luczon: Polymerian orgy

WE WAKE up in the morning, likely to wash our face from soaps packed in sachets, then we drink coffee or hot milk packaged in sachets. We get the eggs from the grocery store which have plastic egg trays, or if we bought it from a neighbor's store it was placed in cellophane packing.

Finishing an entire breakfast routine alone, we might have wasted more than 100 grams of plastic-based packs. Imagine how often we waste plastic-based materials daily multiplied by the population we have in both rural and urban areas.

Despite good intentions, waste segregation are most of the time futile on two common factors: our behavior of not following segregation and putting up different trash bins for different waste materials; and another is even if we did segregate, garbage collection truck will still mix these different wastes, leading to the landfills with only the diligent hands of the scavengers getting recyclable garbage.

Inasmuch as these scavengers get to separate plastics and other possibly useful and valuable materials from the landfill, still a huge volume of plastic wastes are mixed from other sources of biodegradable and non-biodegradable garbage.

And as this tale would go on, some plastic wastes in our backyard eventually lead to the seas and would travel to the vast oceans of the earth.

The recent report from the United Nations Environment Programme (Unep) gave harrowing figures - our country is one of the five countries in the world where half of the earth's plastic pollutants in the oceans originated from.

In its 2015 study "Plastic waste inputs from land into the ocean," its data showed that the Philippines wastes more than 6.2 million kilograms of plastic per day, that means 81 percent of our plastic wastes are mismanaged.

For context, countries like Japan and the United States similarly waste millions of kilograms per day — 19 million kg and 37 million kg respectively — but both had a 0 percent mismanagement rating, meaning almost virtually no plastic wastes get carried to the oceans.

Interestingly, Philippines' other "buddies" in excessive plastic waste mismanagement are China, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam. All are Asian countries, four from Southeast Asia region - and this means that the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) has to do something about it.

In 2017, international environmental group, Greenpeace has called the Asean to seriously draw mechanisms to curb the waste mismanagement.

On June 5, this year, in line with World Environmental Day, the Asean Centre for Biodiversity (ACB) has claimed it joined the movement to reduce plastic wastes for environment in the region.

ACB Executive Director Dr. Theresa Mundita S. Lim, has supported this claim by citing Los Baños, Laguna being Philippines' first ever municipality that regulated the use of plastic bags through Municipal Ordinance No. 2008-752.

This is also the direction of the City Government of Cagayan de Oro, starting January 1, 2019. The local government has begun disseminating to the public about the regulation of plastic packages as early as August and started a campaign on the use of "eco bags."

Then again, even "eco bags" might have the slightest plastic materials in it, and still vulnerable being thrown out anywhere.

That is why, all these regulations would mean nothing if we fail to be consistent on these two, again these are: learned behavior to segregate, and properly segregated garbage trucks and landfills

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