Tarlac folk ask DENR: Junk landfill project

CAPAS, Tarlac — Thousands of residents here and in neighboring Bamban town will picket the Department of Environment and Natural Resources building in Quezon City tomorrow to pressure Secretary Heherson Alvarez into scrapping the proposed landfill of the Clark Development Corp.

Mayors Rey Catacutan of this town and Leonardo Anunciacion of Bamban will lead their constituents, municipal officials and religious, civic, non-government and militant leaders in trekking to the DENR from here at 6 a.m. tomorrow.

Catacutan said they have abandoned plans to hold demonstrations in the province and at the Clark special economic zone after Alvarez ordered a review of the multimillion-dollar, 100-hectare proposed landfill’s environmental compliance certificate.

"The safety and well-being of our people and our environment are now in the hands of Secretary Alvarez," he said.

The CDC awarded the proposed landfill’s 25-year, build-operate-transfer contract to a German consortium which boasts of having constructed several sanitary landfills across Europe.

The landfill is proposed to be developed in Barangay Kalangitan, which is within the Clark subzone, at this town’s southwestern end.

Anunciacion said they decided to join the anti-landfill crusade because the landfill site is only about five kilometers away from Bamban’s Dapdap resettlement where some 4,000 families displaced by the 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo now live.