There were a lot of complaints recently about the pile-up of garbage in the City because trucks and compactors were not collecting it.
This was explained by the authorities as caused by the breakdown of vehicles and/or their insufficient numbers, and eventually, they managed to borrow vehicles to temporarily help out with the job of collection.
But in fact, our huge garbage problem isn’t just about collection or the horrors of the dumpsite or a future landfill.
Our garbage problem also has everything to do with business practices, consumer habits, plain bad behavior of people, and poor governance.
Business is guilty by over-packaging products, by producing one-time use products that become instant trash, by filling the world with consumer gewgaws, by not planning the afterlife of their products, among many other sins.
Government is guilty of not devoting the needed high-level attention and large-scale resources to manage the solid waste problem and its serious effects, and in the case of Dumaguete City, of continuing to refuse to enforce its own ordinance that would radically reduce the scourge of plastic bags and Styrofoam containers.
As humans are being redefined as consumers, people are willingly falling into the trap of directing their dreams and ambitions towards the purchase, possession, and consumption of all kinds of “stuff”, a good part of which is future garbage.
And how should they resist when every bit of public space, not to mention ubiquitous media, is about advertising and manipulating people towards consumer behavior?
Then there’s the habit of littering. It seems just a reflex for people to drop on the street wrappers of candy or other items, to toss them into canals or street drains, to stick them into shrubs, or in spaces between tree branches, to toss them out of moving tricycles, jeepneys or other vehicles.
How often do I see people on motorcycles toss away food and drink containers? Just yesterday, a plastic cup and paper bag suddenly flew out of the window of what looked like a new and expensive car.
Now that kids are back in school, the streets in my neighborhood are littered with the wrappers of the snacks they eat as they walk home: the plastic tubes of ice candy, the little plastic bags and straws for soft drinks, all the colored plastic paper containers of junk snacks.
And why should kids, who are being told in school not to litter, not do this when it’s what they see adults doing?
The fact that garbage has long been part of the landscape in very many streets and neighborhoods all over the City, and that children have grown into adulthood with trash always in view, has likely desensitized people into accepting that it’s merely part of their normal environment.
A sad state of affairs and not one that any amount of signage will correct.
The City should look into the Environment Management Bureau’s “green education” project and also, crucially, into law enforcement measures; unfortunately, something that we’re notoriously bad at.
Did anyone notice that June is Environment Month, officially declared in 1998? Things have only gotten worse since then for our poor Mother Earth.
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Author’s email: h.cecilia7@gmail.com
