Odor from Inayawan
Cebu City Councilor Joel Garganera has threatened to file an administrative complaint before the anti-graft office against former city councilor Nida Cabrera for dishonesty in relation to the issue on the proposed landfill in Barangay Binaliw. Garganera is chairman of the city council’s committee on environment while Cabrera is currently the head of the City Environment and Natural Resources Office.
Garganera raised suspicions Cabrera connived with ARN Builders, the developer of the proposed landfill in Binaliw, to secure an environmental compliance certificate (ECC) with the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR). The “dishonesty” part was when Cabrera went to Manila supposedly for a workshop initiated by the Environmental Management Bureau ang Garganera believed she was actually there to help the owner of ARN Builders secure the ECC.
But that is not what interests me on this Garganera-Cabrera verbal exchange for now. The other night, we passed by the San Roque, Talisay City portion of the Cebu South Coastal Road and we were assaulted by a smell so foul it was worse than when the controversy on the reopening of the Inayawan dump site erupted last year. Before that, I already saw the photos Garganera posted on Facebook on the garbage situation in Inayawan. But photos couldn’t duplicate foul smell.
The photos Garganera posted was about a private facility in Inayawan that the Cebu City Government used as transfer station for the garbage collected from the barangays before these are hauled by the firm recently contracted to do the job, Pasajero Motors Corp. (Pamocor). By all intents and purposes, the “transfer facility” is now a dump site after months of use by the City. Thus the foul smell.
In waste management, a transfer station is “a place where residential garbage and commercial wastes are compressed, baled, and loaded on vehicles for moving to disposal sites, as for landfill.” Okay, that’s from dictionary.com and is therefore an American definition. In our transfer station, wastes are not “compressed, baled and loaded” but are rather dumped there by dump trucks then picked up by the hauler to a landfill, in our case the one in Consolacion.
Republic Act 9003 or the Solid Waste Management Act mandates that a transfer station’s design and operation must comply with environmental standards and guidelines. Also, the garbage should be removed within 24 hours after it was placed there. It is obvious from the photos Gareganera posted that the design and operation of the private sanitary landfill in Inayawan has buckled down because of the amount of the garbage dumped there and which remained uncollected for days.
Where does my beef with Cabrera lies? The said official has touted herself as an environmentalist and it was precisely because of this, plus her closeness with DENR 7 officials, that Mayor Tomas Osmeña had her supervise the aborted reopening of the Inayawan dumpsite and appointed her to head the Cenro. Yet the City has continued to mismanage its garbage disposal effort, destroying the ecology and threatening the health of the people of Inayawan and its neighboring areas. What gives, environmentalist Nida?