Trucks haul less trash to landfill with ‘no segregation, no collection’ policy

SEGREGATE your garbage or get sued. This was the message of the Environmental Management Bureau (EMB) of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) 7 to barangays in Cebu City.

Former city councilor Nida Cabrera, who is now a consultant of Mayor Tomas Osmeña, said EMB is committed to help the City Government with its garbage concerns, particularly with the implementation of the “no segregation, no collection” policy.

“EMB is monitoring us. Those barangays that will not comply with the “no segregation, no collection” policy, EMB will issue a notice to sue them because they’re willing to help us,” Cabrera said.

Cabrera said that based on their monitoring, there was 50-percent compliance on the first day of the strict implementation of the City’s “no segregation, no collection” policy yesterday.

With the compliance, Cabrera said there was less garbage dumped at the Inayawan Sanitary Landfill yesterday.

She, however, could not provide yet the data on the garbage collected yesterday as they have yet to collate the report from the landfill.

Cabrera said the only problem they encountered was the garbage dumped on the sidewalks and vacant lots.

To address this, she said they will come up a system that will be implemented by the barangay environmental officers (BEO) of each village.

BEOs will monitor these areas and conduct an inventory of all the households nearby, and ask who among them didn’t bring their garbage to the garbage trucks during the collection period. This will help determine who was responsible for dumping unsegregated wastes.

For now, Cabrera said the City will still collect garbage dumped in public areas that was not segregated. These will be segregated once it reaches the landfill.

She said this is the reason she requested the mayor to hire 10 more personnel for the Inayawan landfill in addition to the 18 existing landfill workers.

Cabrera said Osmeña already approved the hiring of BEOs in the barangays, who will help the City in addressing its concerns on garbage.

The smaller barangays will have three BEOs each while the bigger ones will have five to eight BEOs.

Osmeña issued a memorandum last week directing all barangays and department heads to strictly enforce the “no segregation, no collection” policy in compliance with Republic Act 9003 or the Ecological Solid Waste Management Act of 2000 and City Ordinance 2031 or the Solid Waste Segregation-at-source.