Mounds of trash have sprouted in many streets across the metropolis of 12 million people since a major landfill at nearby San Mateo was closed Dec. 31 due to local protests.
Officials have so far failed to find a permanent dump, and the search for where to put Metro Manila’s trash has become a political issue as potentially explosive as Estrada’s impeachment trial.
The growing piles of garbage, swarming with flies, roaches and rats, as they decompose in the tropical sun, have health officials warning of impending illness – even death.
"If we have a national health epidemic, let me tell you it’s going to be worse than having a few people inconvenienced," Health Secretary Alberto Romualdez said.
For years, Manila has faced a growing garbage problem as residents and politicians in surrounding towns refuse to allow construction of new dumps.
The Clean Air Act, passed in 1999, complicated matters by forbidding the use of the incinerators that many developed countries employ.
The trash problem came at a bad time for Estrada, a former action film star on trial in the Senate since Dec. 7 on corruption charges.
Demands for his resignation have grown from groups claiming he can’t focus on running the country as he fights to stay in office.
Desperate officials considered shipping Manila’s trash to central Semirara Island, a protected marine turtle sanctuary 290 kilometers south of Manila.
But residents there howled when they got wind of the plan and obtained a temporary court injunction.
Tourism officials objected, too, pointing out that Semirara was just 27 kilometers from Boracay, the country’s most famous beach resort.
Two barges, journeying to the island for two days with more than 2,000 tons of trash, turned around and steamed back to Manila after Estrada yielded to the uproar and shelved the idea.
Last Thursday, Estrada ordered the San Mateo landfill to reopen for six months to give the government time to look for another site.
Angry mobs from the municipalities of San Mateo and Antipolo, home to a combined 600,000 residents and each with a piece of the landfill inside their territory, responded Saturday night by blocking a highway leading to the dump, halting traffic from Manila, 25 kilometers to the west.
Joined by Roman Catholic priests and nuns, they were dispersed at dawn the next day by riot police using a water cannon and a bulldozer.
Tensions eased when Interior and Local Government Secretary Alfredo Lim arrived and promised that the landfill would be used for no more than three months.
The landfill opened in 1991 for the 6,000 tons of trash churned out by Metropolitan Manila each day.
A smaller dump in Payatas, in Quezon City, was closed last July after a wall of rubbish collapsed on a shanty community, killing more than 200 people.
Estrada signed an order in July 1999 to close the San Mateo landfill by the end of 2000, promising to look for a permanent dump elsewhere in the meantime.