Iloilo City increases garbage collection fee

ILOILO CITY: The city government has increased garbage collection fee in response to the rising expenses of managing the city’s solid waste.

Newly appointed General Services Office (GSO) head Neil Ravena said that the hike in garbage fees will cover the cost incurred for street sweeping, garbage collection, and landfill operations.

He pointed out that the collection rate has not been increased in the past 16 years.

“Based on the computation, the city government spent more on garbage collection and disposal compared to the collected fees. There’s a very big difference, so we made adjustments to lessen the impacts of subsidizing this service,” Ravena said.

The Cost-of-Service Analysis conducted in 2023, through the United States Agency for International Development, showed a gap between the revenue generated from garbage collection fees and the actual expenses borne by the city government.

In 2022, the city’s operational expenses for Solid Waste Management (SWM) amounted to P365,652,709.61. However, the revenue generated from garbage fees totaled only P 5 5 , 9 2 7 , 211 .

Comparatively, this marked an increase from the 2021 expenditures of P332,825,268.76, with a corresponding garbage fee collection of P55,801,000.

Ravena said the situation incurred the city government a subsidy of P309,725,498.61, which accounted for 84.70 percent of the SWM operational costs in 2022.

In 2021, the subsidy amounted to P277,024,268.76, constituting 82.23 percent of the total expenses.

A Waste Analysis and Characterization Study conducted in 2021 showed that the average daily waste generation per capita in Iloilo City stands at 1.08 kilograms or 496 tons annually.

Concurrently, the city’s 3.5-hectare sanitary landfill area in Calajunan, Mandurriao district receives an average of 304 tons of garbage per day.

Projections indicate that the landfill will reach full capacity by 2026.

Ravena also highlighted that there are areas in the city that are not accessible by dump trucks, necessitating the establishment of collection points.

“The barangay will help the households on how to bring their waste to the collection point. At the same time, the barangay will assign the collection time,” Ravena said.

“We are doing all these to improve the efficiency of our SWM and as compliance with RA 9003 (Solid Waste Management Act). We should not just rely on increasing the garbage fee,” the GSO head added.