NIMBY

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Not In My Back Yard.

No explanation necessary there, but this is the problem that the City of Dumaguete is faced with in looking for a sanitary landfill site. Six sites in Valencia, Dauin and Bacong that had been considered for this landfill did not materialize because of this NIMBY attitude or principle.

This is not to accuse the nimbees (yes, the term could refer to persons as well) of being anti-development. One only has to look at the Candau-ay dumpsite and imagine the conditions of the people living around it, with 80 or so tons of smelly garbage added every day.

How time has changed. When the dumpsite was still known as the Gene V. Duran Ecological Park (has the City Council changed the name already?) in the late 1990s, it was a favorite Lakbay-Aral site for visitors from across the country because there was no foul smell, there were no flies, there was an aviary, and the park was well-maintained. Visitors would even be pleasantly surprised when the City would arrange for their snacks to be served right on the park itself!

One can only guess how this problem became too big for the City to handle — too much daily garbage, too small dumpsite, lack of bulldozers to push or arrange the garbage, and the inavailability of that bacteria that they used to spray on the garbage to hasten decomposition. Among other things.

With the absence of a suitable alternative for a landfill at this point, and with the DENR’s closure order for the dumpsite hanging over the heads of local government executives, we must now realize, if we haven’t realized yet, that we’re in deep you-know-what.

We continue to produce garbage, and we continue to throw things away. And where’s “away”? Definitely, Not In My Back Yard.

So the obvious solution may just be staring us in the face: we should simply lessen our garbage.

As the prominent environment lawyer Antonio Oposa himself said, garbage should be disposed of in your own territory. This principle does not have an acronym (and should not have one) but the idea makes a lot of sense. We’re talking of recycling, composting, and not buying anything that would only be used once and thrown away, wherever that is.

Let’s compel each household to reduce, reuse, recycle. Let’s require each barangay to take responsibility for its own garbage by coming up with a real and working Materials Recovery Facility and maybe a common compost for biodegradable garbage.

In your own territory
, as Oposa suggests. The obvious and not-so-new paradigm in garbage disposal.

Anyone?

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