When we throw something away, do we even care to know where it actually goes?
For Dumaguete residents, chances are, what we throw away actually ends up in the Dumaguete dumpsite in barangay Candau-ay.
Taking in about 50 tons of garbage daily (that’s about 60 truckloads), the dumpsite continues to operate despite a law, the Ecological Solid Waste Management Act of 2000, mandating its closure.
The problem is simple–there’s just no place to transfer the dumpsite or to set up a sanitary landfill. It’s something we can not do anything about.
Unless we think out-of-the-box; we can perhaps reclaim part of the sea and make it our own artificial island for such purpose.
Mayor Manuel Sagarbarria has thought of his own out-of-the-box solution, which is to introduce improvements in the dumpsite. That’s on-site development: In 2013, he transferred the office of the dumpsite administrator right next to the dumpsite so he could manage the problem day in-day out.
The City acquired bulldozers to regularly flatten out the mounds of garbage, while also procuring bio-enzymes to hasten the shrinking of trash and speed up decomposition.
The City also established Materials Recovery Facilities at the barangay level, where segregation-at-source is being pushed.
The barangays are urged to help collect, recover, recycle, and reuse their own garbage, and bring to the dumpsite only the residual waste, Sagarbarria said.
Some of the barangays that are seriously engaged in the MRF program are Junob, Candauay, and Calindagan.
We don’t have to live in these barangays to help the City address the garbage problem. Right in our own homes, we can reduce the amount of waste each of our households produces, we can re-use plastics, bottles, and other non-biodegradable materials, and recycle unusable items into works of art. We’ve seen cartwheels being made into coffee tables. There should be many other examples.
If all of do these, we don’t even have to keep throwing things “away”, where they would most likely end up in our City dumpsite, and further aggravate the problem.
A long shot, yes, but who said it can’t be done? There’s no harm in trying. Or trying again. We just have to start today.
