How do you solve a problem like garbage?
Everyone produces it but nobody wants to do the dirty job of having to clean it up.
The Dumaguete City open dumpsite in barangay Candau-ay needs to be closed down. It was not a good location for a dumpsite to begin with, as it is just beside the Banica River.
Recently, the dumpsite just burned for days due to spontaneous combustion, releasing foul-smelling smoke that stuck to clothes, food around the area, and worse, the lungs of the people living nearby.
And this was not the first time. Whenever the Banica overflowed after a storm, a lot of garbage found their way to the sea, further polluting our already-polluted coastline.
There are many possible solutions. One is to put up a sanitary landfill. Another is to convert our waste into energy. There’s a possibility of incinerating it. Still another is to go into waste segregation and recycling.
Previous efforts to look for an alternative dumpsite have failed, with the plan being met with serious objections from the communities that were being eyed as hosts. No one was just willing to have a dumpsite in his backyard or anywhere in his neighborhood.
But what do we do with our garbage? Each day, we produce more and more of it. In less than five years, we’ve doubled the volume of our trash to 80 tons daily. And there are no indications it will reduce anytime soon.
Clearly, Dumaguetenos haven’t been doing a good job in waste segregation either. A local Ordinance provides that we are to segregate our respective trash at source, meaning from our own homes, and tag them: red for Dili Malata like cans and bottles, green for Malata or those that are biodegradable, and yellow for toxic wastes.
But who truly painstakingly separates trash and buying the color-specific tags, knowing that the trucks come by and dump them all in one truck anyway?
Since we have been generating so much trash, maybe we can seriously and consciously begin to use less of the non-biodegradable and non-recyclable like polystyrene, commonly known as styropor, containers.
We’ve probably accomplished much in this field but we could still do a whole lot more. Maybe we have to revisit our laws against the use of plastics and other laws governing the dumpsite, if we have any, and strictly implement it; refine it if we have noted some loopholes; or just trash it if it doesn’t serve our purpose.
