Waste makes haste, a postscript

The usual mantra against too much haste that often leads to undesirable result is to slow down, because “haste makes waste”. With regard to the problem on solid waste management, the urgent top priority of LGUs is setting up the sanitary landfill to cope with their “waste makes haste”.

Per Executive Order 774 in relation to the solid waste management law (RA 9003) tolling the penalty warning for non-compliance, the LGU executives are feeling, like, their behinds hovering smack over the crater of a seething volcano. Thus, finding that urgent sanitary landfill demands such haste, with neither room for frittering away more time as before, nor the luxury of ignoring it altogether as in “bahala na”.

Even perhaps the Cebu City waste facility in Inayawan looks more like an open dumpsite bursting at the seams, than a sanitary landfill that could hardly suffice. As for the cities of Mandaue and Lapu-Lapu, with Cordova town as well, whose terrain is generally plain – except Mandaue with one or more two gullies perhaps in Tawason and Casili – what happens to their solid waste with the forced closure of their open dumpsites?

Like Cebu City, with spacious hallows or ravines cradled between mountain ranges and hills for sanitary landfills, the three other up north towns of Consolacion, Liloan, and Compostela can each also make do with their own gorges in interior barrios. Meanwhile, their LGUs that haven’t finalized as yet a common sanitary landfill, their solid garbage disposal issue may not be that daunting.

Perhaps, the most pressing is that of Mandaue City whose over-congested open dumpsite in barangay Umapad is a spitting distance from the Mactan Channel, now saturated with fecal contamination that goes with the dumpsite seepage and Butuanon River’s toxic drain.

Mayor Jonas Cortes has lately – and admittedly belated – whipped up the 27 barangay captains for the recycling of their plastic trash, and composting the biodegradable waste into organic fertilizer. And fearlessly wielding the political will – shades of JF Kennedy’s profile in courage – the young Hizzoner closed down Umapad as an open dumpsite, sans prejudice of restructuring it as limited sanitary landfill.

Mayor Cortes’ immediate target is for all the 27 barangays to undertake pronto the waste segregation of every household source for eventual processing into organic fertilizer, such that, only the residual waste which is negligible in quantity will end up at the landfill.

It now appears that about 15 of the 27 barangays have their own material recovery facilities (MRF) where the final segregation is done and, where composting of the biodegradable waste takes place. Meantime, the recyclable solid waste, such as, plastics, glass, paper/carton, rags, rubber, etc. at the barangay or school MRFs could be sold to some 40 accredited recyclers.

Mrs. Guadalupe Cabahug-Latonio, an active environmental advocate being tapped by Mayor Jonas Cortes, is in liaison with Mandaue’s private and public schools in implementing the “Jonas C. Cortes Youth Ecological Advocacy (YEA) Program” via the school pupils and students as regards the recyclable waste, also involving barangay officials, parents, and teachers.

The ultimate solution of Mandaue’s solid waste disposal in all its 27 barrios is far from over, but the basic societal awareness and civic responsibility, now roused and laid out. The defining bottomline is that Mayor Jonas Cortes has dared with such guts and political will to take the bull by its horns. Let his critics and the naysayers push behind him, instead of pulling him back or down.

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