Teaching a city to segregate

Cebu City Mayor Nestor Archival unveiled this week 19 “big-ticket” projects his administration plans to implement this year, while also reporting that 144 projects were accomplished in his first six months in office. According to a report by The FREEMAN last Thursday, the mayor described these projects as “pillars of the Cebu City 2035 roadmap, designed to make the city leaner, smarter, and more inclusive.”

Among the administration’s priorities is waste segregation and its conversion into fertilizer and other sustainable uses. Earlier this month, the mayor urged residents to strictly follow segregation rules. The City’s “No Segregation, No Collection” policy is mandated by City Ordinance No. 2031, but it has apparently suffered poor compliance for more than two decades. The ordinance requires households to sort their trash into biodegradable, recyclable, non biodegradable, hazardous, and bulky waste, with corresponding penalties for noncompliance.

The Cebu City Solid Waste Management Board recently approved a plan to strictly implement the “No Segregation, No Collection” policy, with city officials agreeing that public education must come before enforcement. The Manila Times quoted the mayor as saying that the city government will first roll out a citywide information and education campaign from January 1 to 15, to prepare residents, barangays, and institutions for full implementation.

Indeed, the hardest obstacle in a waste segregation policy is public attitude and conduct. Professors Tanu Kumari and Akhilesh Singh Raghubanshi of the Institute of Environment and Sustainable Development (IESD), Banaras Hindu University, even frame these as “substantial barriers” that can derail solid waste reforms unless a city deliberately builds knowledge, education, and skills, in the book Waste Management and Resource Recycling in the Developing World (2023).

More than a technical engineering project, waste segregation is a social engineering and design project. Ordinary households are not used to sorting their garbage, and may even find it a hassle when compelled to do so. And any social engineering project requires more than information dissemination and education.

The common attitude is that people don’t care for things they have disposed of. To them, that is the responsibility of government. That is what their taxes are paying for. Meanwhile, if the approach is mainly punitive (punishing violators), it only leads to resentment or to more cheating of the system. Conditions must be designed to convert awareness into habit.

Thus, poor implementation of segregation is a design problem requiring systemic design solutions. Sustainable segregation happens when a whole system is designed to make sorting not only easier to do but also rewarding. Adefris Damene & Satyal (2023), in a study about household practices of solid waste segregation published in the Humanities and Social Sciences Communications journal, found that 84% of respondents said they were willing to segregate, yet only 21% reported doing it regularly. It is a challenge of space, containers, convenience, and trust in the system.

Many residents, for example, reported they lacked sufficient space to segregate at home. Their physical environment discourages compliance, as there is not only a lack of space but also a lack of containers for segregation, with residents citing the cost of bins as unaffordable. The city should design and distribute multi-compartment bins for segregation, with compartments for organics, paper, and recyclables.

If the city wants to succeed and give life to the city ordinance on segregation, it must teach segregation with our material conditions in mind, a system of segregation that works in cramped households and informal settlements. That means coordinating at the sitio level with barangays for standardized, affordable bin options, placement guidance, and collection logistics that match the space reality of households. You design responsibility into the system not just through consequences but, more so, through visible norms, neighborhood accountability, and coordination.

Experts suggest using existing community groups or networks as behavior-changing engines. In Cebu City’s case, these are the “parokya” or parishes, purok, or sitio associations, homeowners associations, condo corporations and building administrators, block leaders and barangay tanods, schools and campus communities, market vendors associations, business chambers, junk shop networks and scrap dealers, among others.

The Adefris Damene & Satyal study explains that people who participate in social organizations are more likely to segregate, because these groups function as platforms for shared responsibility, cooperation, and the adoption of group decisions and actions.

If the city treats segregation as design, it must pair education with tools, incentives, enforcement, and reliable garbage collection service.