We can’t decry it angrily enough: Hazardous waste spells ‘death’ for everyone! - BY THE WAY by Max V. Soliven

Yesterday’s query in this column provoked such a shocked response from many friends and neighbors that I’m puzzled why NOBODY among our officials from the Palace down to local government units ever thought of how the lack of a safe disposal system for hazardous, toxic, and disease-impregnated, slimy hospital waste (including – ugh – body parts) is poisoning our people.

Is it because our public officials and politicians are ignorant – worse, stupid – or because they simply don’t give a damn? Our mayors, many of whom are up for reelection, should have been the first line of defense in this terrible health and sanitation problem. Let our citizens demand an explanation from them. Or replace them. Are wheeling and dealing the first and exclusive preoccupation of our insensate public "servants"?

The President and Executive Secretary Edgardo Angara (the latter has just, hopefully, taken over tackling the garbage crisis) must address themselves on an emergency basis to this deadly challenge. There are those who claim that the antics, grandstanding, verbal acrobatics, and histrionics of our Senator-judges, and the legalistic taekwondo being undertaken by both prosecution and defense panels are a dangerous waste of time. I submit that the terrible garbage problem – particularly the abject failure to dispose of hazardous and toxic waste – is a dangerous waste of lives.

Haven’t you noticed? Aside from the heavy brown mist of pollution which overhangs our metropolis of 11 million people, night and day, there is the less visible but much more perilous proliferation of toxic and hospital waste being strewn about willy-nilly. Owing to this spreading pollution and the poisoning of our water-table (including, I suspect, the aquifer) and the food chain, this means that what we drink, eat, and breathe has become increasingly life-threatening. No wonder there is a virtual, but unadmitted, spread of disease, from throat and lung ailments to cancer, including leukemia. We’re wallowing in filth, which we ingest with every breath and swallow.

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And why should foreign investors – even if Erap were to vanish, today, into thin air – risk themselves by coming to the Philippines? The word has gone around that they’ll encounter not merely two-legged rats and palm-oustretched bureaucrats but a miasma of microbes of every imaginable variety. Aside from human pests, we’ve degenerated into a zone of pestilence.

Do I exaggerate? I wish I did.

Reopening the San Mateo dumpsite? Pity the people in those communities along the route of the loathsome dump truck caravans. Payatas is gone. Smokey Mountain, still festering in part in Tondo, has long been closed. Alternative dumpsites in Cavite, Bataan and Zambales are being blocked by indignant citizens and environmentalists. I trust that the insane (and profitable to some) plot to transport Metro Manila’s awesome daily trash (6,000 metric tons), 300 nautical miles to Semirara, off Antique, has been trashed – as it deserves.

Secretary Robert "Solid Waste" Aventajado insists that he is not a crook. Metro Manila Development Authority Chairman Jejomar Binay is not as noisily pleading his innocence. But even if it’s not true, as many suspect, that they and their friends stand to slurp up millions of dishonest pesos from this fast-tracked allegedly P5-billion deal, they ought to be tarred, blued and feathered, US Southern-style, for having tried to foist such a ridiculous and horrible plan on all of us.

The Semirara "barging" conspiracy would have destroyed our fishing waters all along the path of those overflowing, uncovered, garbage barges and scows, and destroyed the livelihood of scores of thousands of fishermen, poisoning, into the bargain, the fish and other seafood on our dining tables, while leaching deadly chemicals and disease-bearing substances into the soil and underground water of Antique and its environs.

What is most deplorable is the vital time lost. While Aventajado was ululating over the "proven" virtues of "sanitary landfill" – an oxymoron as even the Americans can tell you – other far more quick, safe, and efficient means of disposing of garbage and more modern technologies were ignored or haughtily dismissed out of hand. With every eye glued to our television sets, and the public gaze focussed with morbid fascination on the impeachment trial and the agonies of Mr. Estrada, nobody noted until it was too late, what Aventajado and his bunch were up to. In the end, when the foul stench of piled-up garbage in our neighborhoods became unbearable and compelled our attention, we were presented with only ONE solution – the silly Semirara "landfill" conundrum!

This is snake-oil peddling and flimflammery, in my book, of the most treacherous sort. If you ask me, this solution was worse than the problem. The "cure" was more dangerous than the disease. In fact, it heightened the crisis: How can you ship hazardous and toxic waste, mixed-in with regular garbage, across hundreds of miles of ocean, without spilling it enroute to the detriment of the Pacific Ocean and the South China Sea? The currents that connect the two bodies of water and the marine life ingesting them would have borne the pestilential, noisome, venomous, toxins to the four points of the compass.

Has the reign of greed overcome the dictates of self-preservation and common sense? In England and Western Europe, they’re in a tizzy over the spread of "mad cow" disease. Here, the disease that spawns madmen is what ought to concern us!

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I must repeat, to the point of nagging: We’ve been acting like idiots in a "fool’s paradise" with regard to hazardous waste.

Where are they disposing of the 300,000 to 400,000 metric tons of hazardous waste generated annually, which consists not only of chemicals but also of the detritus of hospitals and medical clinics, reeking of diseased-blood, pus, surgically-removed parts, rotting matter, and communicable bacteria and microbes? Even the "burning" of such waste in old-fashioned incinerators would have released those poisons, both lethal and smelly, into the atmosphere. Now that the ill-conceived, sloppily-pasted-together, jerry-built "Clean Air Act" has prohibited even modern, technologically streamlined incinerators, where can these daily tons of death-giving waste go?

Our Senators and congressmen who sponsored that "Clean Air Act (which, by the way, has not even been implemented, with DENR Secretary Tony Cerilles fast asleep at the switch, perhaps?) should answer that inexorable question to the satisfaction of the worried public. We’ve been so obsessed with the emotion-charged idea of getting rid of a President that we seem to have entirely forgotten the even more vital problem (for our own safety) of getting rid of disease, and, by the same token, warding off poison.

The other day, for example, I mentioned a revolutionary method of disposing of garbage – and separately, I must add today, of hazardous and poisonous waste – namely, a "pyrolysis gasification process." This is a process which is an offshoot of space technology. American and European scientists, in sending rockets and spacecraft into the far reaches of our galaxy, had to cope with the question of preventing these craft from burning up when they returned to earth and plunged back into our atmosphere. Ordinary steel and other metals would have ignited and burned, or melted down, under the extreme friction of "re-entry" and, therefore, technicians had to develop a coating for returning craft or projectiles that would be able to stand such intense heat of friction. In their space age laboratories, scientists and engineers "invented" a ceramic which fitted the bill. After many space launches and re-entries, this "proven" ceramic, it was discovered, could be applied to industrial uses. Thus was developed the "pyrolytic gasification" chamber. The result is a process that is not banned by the Clean Air Act, because it is not incineration, but one in which garbage and other materials, exposed to extremely high temperatures (indirectly through convection), are degraded from the indirect heat, while at the same time being moved through an almost oxygen-free primary chamber under a vacuum effect. This means that garbage vanishes without even a puff of smoke!

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Mr. Joey Tirona, who for three years has been pushing the $250-million project through his Phoenix Pacific Resource & Power, Inc., in a tie-up with Balboa Corp. of California, came to see me yesterday after I’d written about his system.

Tirona said he had been invited by Quezon City Mayor Ismael "Mel" Mathay to a meeting tomorrow to discuss possibly putting this system into place. However, although the project is supposed to be a Build, Own, and Operate (no cash-out on the part of the government, but, instead, a guarantee of consumption and payment-per-use) basis, this is no sign that the project, which has been pending (to Tirona’s frustration) the past two years, will finally push through.

On the other hand, Tirona said, if the President and Executive Secretary Angara are interested, the national government could contract for a smaller but equally efficient "pyrolytic gasification" plant which could be completed and set into motion IN LESS THAN TEN MONTHS. In short, if there’s a will on the part of the government, there’s a way.

This plant could be devoted exclusively to disposing of hazardous garbage and hospital waste, as is done in all civilized countries. As a matter of fact, in advanced countries like, say, Australia, hazardous waste is carefully packed into specially-designed bins and waste containers, picked up by trucks assigned exclusively to hazardous waste and brought to a sanitized, walled-off facility for its disposal.

My suggestion is that the government cut through the red tape, and the usual under-the-table kickback baloney, and act now. Politicians should keep their sticky fingers and cotton-pickin’ hands off it. Lives are at stake.

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We’re not surprised that ex-Finance Secretary Ed Espiritu, after two days of testimony and answering questions, scudded for home – meaning, Los Angeles.

It’s not that Espiritu received a death threat (he did), but because – a prosecutor informed me – he didn’t want to be stampeded into revealing the names of the bigtime smugglers he frequently spotted at social gatherings in Malacañang.

The prosecutor, a former congressman, intimated that those involved in the deadly drug business might be dragged into the discussion by Espiritu, who was perceptibly rattled when some senator-judges pressed him to identify the contraband kings. Smugglers of chicken, rice, corn, sugar, fertilizer, and finished products might not be provoked into maiming or killing, but the drug lords certainly would react murderously.

Will Espiritu come back if further testimony is required? Let’s see. He took off with his wife, by Northwest, and is gone.

Incidentally, I’m intrigued by the announcement by presidential impeachment trial spokesman Ernie Maceda that former movie starlet Laarni Enriquez and the other "special friends" (ladies, of course) of President Estrada would be ready to testify, if summoned, in the impeachment trial. Did he clear this announcement with the Narvasa-Mendoza-Daza defense panel?

After such a public promise by Ambassador Maceda, if Ms. Enriquez or any of the other women, when subpoenaed, failed to appear, the prosecution and the public would make much capital out of any desistance on the part of the defense lawyers to the placing of Laarni and "sisters" on the witness stand. The prosecution would love nothing more than to subject these ladies to an embarrassing grilling, in full view of TV.

C’mon, Erning. Was this "approved" or did you speak out of turn?

By the way, I don’t think that P6 million in silly 500- peso bills so clumsily being smuggled out on the same PAL flight by that guy from San Juan (a coincidence, I’m sure) belonged to Laarni. Nobody’s that dumb – imagine, getting a "mule" to fly on the same plane and be nabbed clutching, in full view of everybody, a big bag of cash.

It’s true enough that there have been many dumb and "incompetent" things done before and during the trial. It’s as bad to have "incompetent" officials as to have corrupt ones. Why, worse, if you think about it. Corruption can be curbed. Incompetence can never be cured.