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THE
waste and pollution watchdog EcoWaste Coalition on
Wednesday welcomed Environment Secretary Lito Atienza’s
order to shut down all open dumps in the country.
And with
Atienza’s “long overdue” closure order, the group is now
warning against turning the
Philippines
into an open country for quick technological fixes that
can further harm the people and the environment.
“The
closure order is long overdue. We’ve heard that before
from other bureaucrats and politicians. What we want to
see is real action, and we’ll only start believing
Secretary Atienza if we see parallel policies and
investments in real solutions to the waste crisis,” Romy
Hidalgo, secretary of the EcoWaste Coalition and
concurrent coordinator of the group’s Task Force on
Dumps-Landfills, said.
Movie
actor Roy Alvarez, vice chairman of the EcoWaste
Coalition said Atienza’s order is, for now, merely “a
good sound bite” unless appropriate steps are taken.
He urged
Atienza to issue a memorandum to local governments
directing concerned officials to enforce “a self-reliant
plant for ecological solid waste management.”
The
ecological solid-waste management plan, the EcoWaste
Coalition pointed out, should lay emphasis on community
education and implementation of proactive waste
prevention, reduction, segregation at source, recycling
and composting through the establishment of
people-driven ecology centers or materials-recovery
facilities, and not rely on financially and
environmentally costly “sanitary” landfills or
“waste-to-energy” incinerators.
EcoWaste
Coalition expressed grave concern about the tendency of
some government officials and personnel to equate dump
closure with the setting up of landfills, or “glorified
dumps,” and repackaged waste burners, asserting that
Republic Act 9003, or the Ecological Solid Waste
Management Act of 2000, calls for the adoption of best
practices in line with ecologically sustainable
development principles, excluding incineration.
From the
perspective of public health, the environment and the
economy, neither landfills nor incinerators provide
ecological, socially just and sustainable solutions to
the country’s garbage woes, EcoWaste Coalition added.
“Every
time we engage with local governments that host dumping
facilities, we are constantly confronted with the
‘wrong’ question: ‘Where can we put the garbage being
generated by our constituents and the institutions and
industries in our jurisdiction if the dump is closed?’”
Hidalgo said.
“Instead
of putting their energy in finding communities that can
be sacrificed to bear the brunt of our wasteful
consumption, we believe that local governments and the
National Solid Waste Management Commission should focus
on holistic waste prevention, minimization and recovery
policies and programs, including the adoption of clean
methodologies for address in the residuals that will not
release harmful environmental pollutants such as dioxins
and furans,” the coalition said. |
