LGUs told to install wastewater facilities

The Department of Environment and Natural Resources-7 is pushing for the establishment of sanitation and wastewater treatment facilities in every local government unit.

Isabelo Montejo, DENR-7 regional executive director, said that this is to ensure the region’s groundwater will not be polluted by infectious waste coming from unsanitary septic tanks, wastewater release from industries and households.

Montejo urged LGUs, together with the water districts, to take the lead in constructing or putting up their own sanitation and wastewater treatment plants so as not to put more stress in the rivers and creeks.

Montejo, in a statement said, that this is also necessary to prevent communities from dumping garbage into waterways thereby avoiding toxic sludge excavated from septic tanks to reach the rivers.

He cited that based on the study conducted by the Asian Development Bank in 2009, more than 20 million Filipinos still have no access to proper sanitation, and only less than 10 percent of the population is actually connected to piped sewerage.

In the same study, it said that 58 percent of the country’s groundwater was contaminated by infectious waste coming from unsanitary septic tanks, wastewater discharge from industries, and runoffs from agricultural fields and dumpsites.

These contaminations, the study added, had been found to have caused the “death” of major water bodies wherein rivers became unable to sustain aquatic life, beaches unfit for recreational activities such as swimming and increased the incidence of waterborne diseases.

DENR-7 information officer Eddie Llamedo said that records from the Environmental Management Bureau -7 revealed that no LGU in Central Visayas has installed or put up such a facility since the passage of Republic Act No. 9275 or the Philippine Clean Water Act of 2004.

To recall, the National Sewerage and Septage Management Program, which was approved in June 2012, seeks to improve water quality and public health in the Philippines by 2020 through improving the ability of local implementers to build and operate effective wastewater treatment systems.

The NSSMP, whose formulation was mandated under R.A. No. 9275, intends to identify other mechanisms and approaches to hasten and facilitate its enforcement.

Montejo said that under the law, all subdivisions and condominiums, commercial establishments, hotels, hospitals, public markets and government buildings should have already been connected to the sewerage system by 2010.

The NSSMP was formulated to enjoin identified highly urbanized cities (HUCs) to provide sewerage and septage services in order to cushion the negative impacts of wastewater discharge on the quality of water resources.

The HUCs include the cities of Cebu, Baguio, Angeles, Tacloban, San Pablo, General Santos, Zamboanga, and ten others.

One of the initial outputs of the NSSMP was the formulation of the Project Implementation Plan that aims to develop sewerage systems in selected HUCs in three phases from 2012 to 2020, with the national government shouldering 40 percent of the costs.

A Program Operations Manual was crafted by the Department of Public Works and Highways to provide guidelines for the HUCs in developing their respective sewerage and septage management systems.

Llamedo added that in the said manual, which was released last March 2013, more than 20 million Filipinos had no access to proper sanitation, seven million of them still practiced open defecation; and that half of septic tanks in the country had not been emptied for the past five years, if at all. —Mitchelle L. Palaubsanon/JMD