Bulacan river polluters to be arrrested

SAN FERNANDO, Pampanga ,Philippines  – Tasked with striking out a river system in the list of a New York-based environmental group as among the world’s “dirtiest,” 100 new anti-pollution patrollers now roam the Marilao-Meycauayan-Obando River system in Bulacan to identify and run after culprits.

Rustico de Belen, chief of the Bulacan environment and natural resources office, said the trained patrollers regularly ply the river system on boats bought by the provincial government so as to bar households from using the river system as garbage dump.

“The patrollers are also identifying houses whose septic tanks and drainpipes run directly to the river,” De Belen said, noting that households are major contributors to the pollution of the rivers.

He quoted the governor as saying that “these anti-pollution marshals will serve as the eyes of the government in protecting the rivers. We need to do our share in the preservation of nature in order to avoid the backlash of nature. We only have one earth. So we should protect it, before it’s too late.”

“Several factories have already been shut down amid reports that the river system is contaminated with battery discharges and metal and tannery residues,” De Belen said.

In a report, the New York-based environmental group Blacksmith Institute listed the river system in Bulacan as among the world’s 30 dirtiest. The group noted that “industrial waste is haphazardly dumped into the Marilao, Meycauayan and Obando Rivers, a source of drinking and agricultural water supplies for the 250,000 people living in and around this suburb of Manila.”

“The river system is extremely polluted due to wastes received from tanneries, gold and precious metals refineries, and legacy lead smelting waste, and numerous municipal dumpsites. Substantial contamination also results from small-scale lead recycling facilities along the river and from the others that dump untreated hexavalent chromium-laced wastewater into the river,” the group said.