Where do you put your garbage ?

Mama Elaine always takes notice of the pile of garbage at the corner of our kitchen. My husband and I live in a studio unit. Hence, there is very little space for everything. Let alone a pile of junk by the kitchen sink. Mama calls it garbage, but it’s a stack of papers, PET bottles, chewing gum wrappers, tin cans, plastic cups, etc. 

We recycle. Back at work in the studio, I collect our old scripts from the set. When in a restaurant, we bring home the soda cans, wash them and put it in our pile of junk. My husband takes them to the family garage in Cavite where he sorts them and sells them to the junk shop. 

Thanks to my husband, we are able to do our humble share of saving Mother Earth. 

Segregating is not always as convenient as we want it to be. The condominium building where I live, for example, only has one trash bin per floor, instead of two or three bins where you can segregate the biodegradable from the non-biodegradable. Local governments should require segregation facilities in condominium buildings before issuing occupancy permits.

I take my hats off to the leaders in Barangay Bagong Pag-asa in Quezon City in their environmental efforts. Households are given incentives whenever they segregate their garbage. They have a booklet, similar to the Starbucks card where we get a stamp for every order of coffee, where residents earn stamps or points for the recyclables collected from their household. In exchange, they get items like laundry soap or noodles. 

In the news this past week is the overwhelming amount of garbage afloat at the Manila Bay. The blame went partly to the residents who live in the esteros, and the garbage was also said to have come all the way from Cavite. Ironically, those who live in depressed areas are the ones who are more recycling-conscious: Using water gallons for plant containers, rusty galvanized sheets for walls, soda bottles as water containers.

The disgusting garbage in Manila Bay is only a small fraction of the amount of garbage that is collected from households. Are we less culpable because our garbage ends up in landfills and dumpsites? Take, for example, the Payatas and the Irisan dumpsites that got the public’s attention because of the fatalities caused by trash slides. A city’s garbage problems are not prioritized unless someone dies and local government gets flak for it. Now, officials are rushing to move the garbage in Irisan to another location. Dumping garbage in a poorer municipality or province is hardly what you would call effective waste management. We have yet to hear about a city with zero waste. Unfortunately, garbage solution comes in spurts, and not the collective action that is needed.

 It has been 10 years since the Solid Waste Management Act was enacted and it is hard to say if the situation has since changed much. Despite the environmental awareness brought about by Ondoy and the tsunamis and hurricanes abroad, habits have not changed and we still don’t know where to put our garbage. Perhaps it is time to revisit the law, and apply stringent measures to those who should be implementing it.  

(E-mail me at [email protected].)