EDITORIAL - Encourage recycling

In a bid to encourage people and establishments to recycle trash, the Cebu City Council’s Committee on Trade, Commerce and Entrepreneurship has recommended the immediate approval of an ordinance compelling establishments in the city to install recycling bins and enforce a deposit-return scheme for bottles and cans.

The ordinance wants supermarkets, malls, and convenience stores to serve as collection points, with mandatory bins and a rebate system for PET bottles, glass bottles, and aluminum cans.

We see this as a good idea. Yes, all steps should be taken to encourage people to start recycling, if even for now the focus is just on PET and glass bottles and aluminum cans. It’s still a good way to reduce the volume of trash we are producing every day.

Cebu City produces between 500 to 700 tons of trash daily. And that volume isn’t going down anytime soon.

As if to emphasize this, Pond A in the South Road Properties is starting to accumulate trash. Instead of being a transfer station where trash must be taken elsewhere after 24 hours, it’s becoming a dumpsite that’s threatening to get bigger.

We hope this attitude to recycle what we can of our trash catches up with most of us, but then again, we can also understand why it may not. The attitude to just dispose of something completely after it has stopped being useful has become ingrained in most of us. Just like our attitude of just throwing trash everywhere; one reason why our streets are always dirty.

Just like an attitude of cleanliness, people should be taught about recycling as early as elementary; that way they carry that attitude all throughout their life.

This goes without saying it would also help to have good role models for good or clean habits.

The reality we are heading to is scary. If nothing is done about the way things are going and the volume of trash we are producing every day, we will soon need more dumpsites. And that means more places like the Binaliw dumpsite, and possibly more incidents like that trash slide that happened there earlier this year, killing 36 people.