7 years after Payatas tragedy, Philippines still mired in trash

MANILA — Seven years after the tragic Payatas landfill landslide, the Philippines remains mired in a worsening garbage and waste mismanagement crisis that will have a significant impact on community health and well-being, environmental activist group Kalikasan People’s Network for the Environment (Kalikasan PNE) said today.

On July 10, 2000, tragedy literally befell a slum community in Payatas, Quezon City when a hill of garbage overlooking the area caved in, killing 218 people and leaving 300 families homeless.

“The waste crisis is worsening at a rapid rate. The national government has so far failed to provide and implement a wide-reaching and viable waste management program which can efficiently process and treat around 13 billion kilos of solid waste generated annually by around 89 million Filipinos,” Kalikasan PNE National Coordinator Clemente Bautista Jr. said.

Bautista stressed that “the Arroyo administration’s failure to stem the waste management crisis in the urban and rural areas was putting the health of millions of communities at risk”.

“In Metro Manila alone, 85 percent of the 6,169 tons of garbage generated daily end up in waterways, such as creeks and esteros close to both residential and commercial areas, making these a breeding ground for diseases and floods induced by clogged waterways,” Bautista said.

“In rural areas, the proliferation of garbage dumpsites has also taken over forest areas, watersheds, and even coastal zones, spreading leachate to otherwise productive soil and water resources and emitting toxic gases into the air,” Bautista said.

Bautista deplored the national government’s lack of political will to assess and address the problem.

“Our government does not seem to have learned a thing from the Payatas tragedy in 2000,” he said.

“Instead of working to solve the national waste problem and taking mitigating measures to protect the community’s health, the Arroyo administration is shamefully geared towards importing more hazardous foreign waste under bilateral agreements such as the Japan-Philippines Economic Partnership Agreement (JPEPA) and promoting a policy of plunder where foreign mining corporations can extract our mineral reserves and irresponsibly leave behind their waste to their heart’s content,” he said.

“The Philippine and Japanese governments deny that JPEPA will bring in more foreign waste. But this is contradicted by the Philippine’s record of foreign waste, which importation only shows that our country is increasingly being used as an alternative dumpsite for developed nations such as Japan and the United States. Data from the National Statistics Office showed that in 2001 alone, the Philippines imported a total amount of foreign waste worth $7,440,264. $2,114,892. Thirty-eight-point-four (38.4) percent of these foreign wastes came from Japan,” Bautista noted.