Necessary trash talk

Few things reveal neighborly concern—or the lack of it—between cities and towns more clearly than how well they manage their garbage. It’s also a test of how innovative local officials can be.

Two stories in yesterday’s issue showed different aspects of the garbage management challenge.

In one, Mandaue City Vice Mayor Carlo Fortuna said that the City would explore the construction of a waste-to-energy facility, inspired by a recent visit to Ayabe City in Japan. In the other story, the head of Cebu City’s Department of Public Services, former councilor Roberto Cabarrubias, assured that a private contractor would remove by this week all the garbage from a so-called transfer station in Inayawan and deliver these to a private landfill in Consolacion.

What’s missing from this picture, and has been for many years now, is a concerted effort among local governments in Metro Cebu to try to fix the garbage problem.

If it gets off the ground, Mandaue City’s waste-to-energy facility could take in trash from other cities or towns. In Cebu City’s case, moving its garbage to another town doesn’t solve the problem in the long run. It merely shifts the garbage some 12 kilometers north and makes it another community’s problem.

In “Best Practices in Local Waste Management,” released last year by the Partnership for Democratic Local Governance in Southeast Asia and Konrad Adenauer Foundation, Ronna Mae Villanueva broke down waste management as a three-fold challenge: it has political and technological aspects, as well as a third aspect that concerns both perception and education. “Waste is a part of life,” she wrote, “and should not be viewed as a problem that ceases to be once it has been removed.”

Case in point: the confirmation, made more than a year ago, that the Philippines is one of the five countries that generate the largest amounts of plastic waste in the world’s oceans. What do our national and local governments intend to do about this? How can individual Filipinos and organized communities help?

Such problems develop from a combination of inadequate policy, insufficient foresight, and lack of environmental concern. It’s a consequence of a lack of neighborliness, also known as “nimby” (for “not in my backyard”) carelessness.

There is much that local governments and central agencies like the environment department can teach us about how we can all manage our waste better. Where, for example, can ordinary households go if their communities aren’t served by door-to-door collectors of recyclable materials? What are our local governments’ best practices for handling not just municipal waste, but also industrial waste, waste water, and storm water?

These are conversations we need to be having with our local governments, and these are long overdue.