The Garbage Situation

The Freeman columnist Bobit Avila, in his “Shooting Straight” of September 16, 2015, writes: “…the biggest issue that Mayor Rama faces today is the collection of garbage. I’m already hearing a lot of negative reports that garbage collection has snarled to a crawl because many of our garbage trucks are broken. It is a fact that in certain barangays, they no longer collect the garbage of business establishments because the collection of the garbage of residences is the priority… ”It used to be that we just had to get our home trash into small bags and wait for the garbage truck to pick them up. And that was the end of it. Our wastes were taken to some place so remote so as not to bother us anymore. There were enough landfills then to bury our garbage in. We were never bothered by bad odor, or rats, or flies from rotting garbage piles.The situation has gotten bad since.

In one study on urban dwellers, it was found that each person produces about a kilo of refuse daily. It is no longer rare for the news media to carry stories about a “garbage crisis.” Legislators are passing laws in order to contain the rising garbage heaps.

Garbage disposal has, indeed, become one of our most menacing social problems. In fact, the government spends a good amount of money in finding ways of solving it. But the solution is not only expensive, it is elusive, as well. It is getting hard to find new areas for creating more landfills to accommodate the daily deluge of trash. And – as Mr. Avila has stated in his column – even the maintenance of garbage trucks is a problem too, at least in Cebu City.

Yet, even if dumping spaces were available and garbage trucks were always functioning, there are issues to face. Health and sanitation experts say landfills are unsafe. Leaking liquid from rotting garbage can potentially pollute the underlying groundwater. About half of our drinking water is sourced from the ground, and any contamination can mean widespread devastation.

Many waste-disposal specialists and public officials prefer incinerators to handle the garbage problem. They call incinerator plants as waste-to-energy systems, or resource recovery facilities. These rather euphemistic terms derive from the fact that most modern garbage incinerators convert the heat from burning garbage into electrical power.

But there is also a negative side to incinerators: toxic air pollution and ash derivatives which may still be potentially toxic. Those opposed to the use of incinerators say that even very small amounts of such toxic emissions as dioxins and other harmful substances can gravely contribute to already existing public health hazards. Besides, incinerators are very expensive to put up and maintain, requiring millions of scarce money.

Some sectors advocate recycling as the ultimate solution. Of course, recycling helps. To re-use or recycle conserves depleting natural resources, such as trees and metal-bearing ores. It saves energy, too. For instance, recycling aluminum requires only 5 percent of the energy it would take to refine aluminum from bauxite ore.

At the moment, though, we still throw away much, much more things than we re-use or recycle. By far, the biggest components of the garbage heap are plastics, paper and paperboard, aluminum cans, food wastes and glass. Many of these items do not decompose. And only about one-fifth of these are recycled.

There is also an approach called source reduction, which advocates creating less garbage in the first place. It certainly helps if we limit our use of goods that are not totally consumable or decomposable. But given today’s trend towards disposable and instant goods, the source-reduction concept hardly gains ground.

The amount of the remnants of our wasteful, over-consumptive ways is tremendous. Thrown-away disposable items and trash from instant-food packages contribute much to our garbage turnout. It is unimaginable how much more garbage we will make in the future, and where it will go. Some developed countries have begun exporting their trash to their third-world neighbors, like the Philippines.

Our garbage piles continue to mount. If we continue to look the other way concerning the garbage situation, entire communities will one day be drowned in the heaps of their own rubbish. Either we will be forced to swallow back what we had recklessly thrown away or we will just rot away with it.