Both the Department of Environment & Natural Resources in Negros Oriental, and the Environment & Natural Resources Office of Dumaguete seem helpless in finding the right answers to this capital City’s garbage disposal system as mandated by law.
The DENR had ordered several years ago to have the open dumpsites in the country shuttered under Republic Act 9003 or the Ecological Solid Waste Management Act of 2000, former Dumaguete Fiscal Ely Escoreal pointed out during a forum Wednesday.
But, until today, the city government has apparently failed to heed the repeated warnings from DENR to close down the said dumpsite and shift to sanitary landfill instead, Escoreal noted. He pointed out that on certain days, there is the perennial problem of foul smell emanating from the garbage disposal site in Candauay.
In response, Charlie Fabre, provincial chief of the DENR, and Rey Awayan, Sr., head of the City ENRO, admitted in the same forum that Dumaguete continues to face a dilemma on where to re-locate the city’s dumpsite currently situated in the outskirts village of Candauay.
The law specifies that local government units must shift instead to sanitary landfill as a disposal site for their garbage, one thing that has never been fully implemented due to a common problem of finding the appropriate location for it, Fabre said.
According to Fabre, it becomes a persistent problem of the DENR calling the attention of the LGU, and the latter in turn being unable to take the necessary action as required by law.
ENRO Chief Rey Awayan, Sr. explained that the implementation of the law that mandates the change to a sanitary landfill from an open dumpsite is to be gradually implemented to give enough time for LGUs to prepare for the shift.
Awayan, however, disclosed that the nearby areas close to the city’s existing dumpsite are already saturated such that there is no room for expansion.
Over the years, the city government had managed to find ways to control the open dumpsite which can now no longer address the needs of Dumaguete.
The city government had acquired bulldozers to regularly flatten out the mounds of garbage while also procuring millions of pesos worth of bio-enzymes to hasten the shrinking of trash and speed up decomposition.
According to Awayan, the city government has also found another solution to address the garbage problems in Dumaguete.
This is the establishment of Materials Recovery Facilities at the barangay level where segregation at source is being pushed, Awayan said.
The barangays are urged to help collect, recover, recycle and reuse their own garbage and bring to the dumpsite only the residual waste, he added.
Some of the barangays that are already engaged in the MRF program are Junob, Candauay and Calindgan, said Awayan.
For now, these are just the measures the city government can do to tackle the garbage problem in the city as according to the ENRO chief, it seems there is no LGU that is willing to host Dumaguete’s sanitary landfill, Awayan stressed. (PNA)
