FOR a week dominated by trash in both the hyperlocal and national news cycles, it was a happy one. The news that nearly six dozen cargo containers filled with trash were sailing back to Canada was good. Even better: our town’s garbage collection services resumed.
For nearly two weeks, garbage collectors stopped going to our neighborhood, which, as you can imagine, prompted a litany of complaints. What was the point of paying an annual garbage collection tax, homeowners asked, when your empty cans, junk food packets, diapers and other household wastes sat (and steamed) in your yard for nearly two weeks?
Barangay or town officials—it wasn’t clear who, exactly—sent a person to explain using a megaphone, while he drove around the neighborhood. Unlike the campaign-season recorrida, however, this roving public address system visited our neighborhood only once. Some of us didn’t catch everything that he said or weren’t around when this bearer of bad news drove by. We had to rely on local news to fill in the gaps.
It turned out that a mountain of trash had collapsed in the privately-operated landfill that receives waste from the households of the cities of Cebu, Mandaue and Lapu-Lapu, apart from the town of Consolacion, where the landfill sprawled. One person had died, SunStar Cebu reported. A bureau in the environment department then suspended the landfill’s operations because it had allegedly violated standards.
When garbage collectors resumed their rounds last week, we didn’t ask whether it was because the landfill had been allowed to reopen or the town’s officials had found someplace else to leave our trash. All we cared about was that our trash was again out of sight and out of mind. It was a relief.
In the same week, we watched news videos of 69 shipping containers being ferried out of Subic Bay, bound for Canada. Several commenters on YouTube couldn’t help but gloat and mention a line from that Celine Dion song: “It’s all coming back to me now.” The Canadian Broadcasting Corp. reported that the private company that sent the trash to the Philippines in 2013 and 2014 was no longer operating. So Canadian taxpayers would pay the $1.14-million bill for bringing the garbage back home.
While the individuals behind Chronic Inc. ought to be held accountable, what about the individuals or company in the Philippines that agreed to receive that shipment in the first place? Did they truly have the facilities to safely process 103 shipping containers full of “recyclable plastics”? How thoroughly did local government and customs officials vet them? The garbage in 34 of the 103 containers that had arrived from Canada—a mix of non-recyclable plastics, paper, household waste, used adult diapers—ended up in local landfills.
Canada isn’t the only country sending its waste to us and other Southeast Asian countries. In an April 2019 research brief, Greenpeace explained that developed countries have been sending “mixed recyclable plastics” to Southeast Asia after China stopped importing waste in January 2018. But some of the top destinations of all that trash, like Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam, quickly adopted restrictions on the importation of plastic waste. Our country has yet to do that.
Aside from regulating the waste management industry more strictly, governments must also play their part. They can, for starters, enforce standards such as those set in the UN Basel Convention, which “forbids developed nations from sending toxic or hazardous waste to developing nations without informed consent,” as CBC’s Catharine Tunney explained.
If that sounds too abstract, then let’s see this for the gut issue it really is: Why are government agencies allowing private companies to pretend they can process imported waste, when they clearly have too much domestic waste to deal with?