CEBU City Mayor Edgardo Labella doesn’t want the city to be a dumping site. That is why he gave local government units that had been dumping their trash at the private landfill in the mountain barangay of Binaliw only until Wednesday, July 31, 2019, to do so.
The Cebu City Government already canceled its P65-million contract with ARN Central Waste Management Inc., operator of the Binaliw landfill.
Although Mandaue City is willing to comply, it has asked for an extension as it is still looking for a landfill that will accept its garbage. Labella said he is open to giving Mandaue more time.
The mayor pointed ARN’s other customers to a newly opened landfill in the southern town of Minglanilla.
The Cebu City Council only approved on Thursday, Aug. 1, the P190-million supplemental budget that the Department of Public Services had requested for garbage collection and disposal. The budget will be paid to a private hauler that has yet to be identified since the City still has to conduct a public bidding.
Labella is only looking after the welfare of his constituents, which is why he doesn’t want the city to become a dumping site. But aren’t Cebu City and its residents the biggest generators of trash in the metro?
If the mayor doesn’t want all that waste to be dumped in Cebu City, where does he expect it to go? Because it has to go somewhere. He can’t well expect other people to deal with our trash. If Cebu City doesn’t want to dump its garbage in its backyard, it can’t well dump it in the neighbor’s.
But it’s also unfair to blame Labella for the problem that he only inherited. Maybe he can use his time at City Hall to come up with a long-term strategy to address it.
At the same time, residents must take responsibility for their actions. They can’t well complain about the smell of uncollected trash that came from their households. They need to accept the consequences of not recycling or segregating their waste because the problem is not going away.