GARBAGED TALKS. That’s how I have come to consider so-called summits on waste management. All hot air, rivaling the very fetidness of their subject. Post-summit action always nothing more than the perfunctory report to the concerned agency.
On May 4, a Summit on Solid Waste Management was convened by the Angeles City government among barangay officials, Regional Director Ricardo Calderon of the Department of the Environment and Natural Resources, the Most Rev. Pablo Virgilio S. David, auxiliary bishop of San Fernando, and other stakeholders.
“Mag-iisang taon na tayo sa panunungkulan, kaya ang responsibilidad na lutasin ang problema ay nasa ating mga kamay. Hindi na po tayo dapat magsisihan.” So Mayor Ed Pamintuan enjoined the local officials. This, notwithstanding the fact that the city’s gargantuan garbage problem was primarily caused by the previous administration’s defaulting on its debt of P64 million with the Metro Clark Waste Management Corp. for the use of its sanitary landfill in Kalangitan, Capas, Tarlac.
Pamintuan took the raging bull by the horn, so to cliché it, in taking full responsibility for the city’s rubbish, vowing to rid the city’s centralized materials recovery facility (MRF) of its mountain of garbage. In truth, that was no MRF at the back of the city engineer’s office in Barangay Pampanga. It was a dump for all kinds of waste, posing a clear and present danger to the Pampang Market and the Don Rafael Lazatin Memorial Medical Center, better known as the Ospital ning Angeles, both but a spit away from the MRF site.
In truth – jaded as we are with the “vows” of elected officials routinely broken and buried in heaps of garbage – we found little hope in the fulfillment of Pamintuan’s promise to clean up the Pampang dump.
I set June 4, as a sort of judgment day for Pamintuan. If the garbage in Pampanga remained by then, I shall go to town pinning him down.
Surprise, surprise.
May 24, not a single discarded plastic bag could be seen at the Pampanga MRF. Where the mountains of garbage were, a plain of brown earth obtains.
“We have already removed the tons of wastes at the MRF and this is just a manifestation of our strong commitment to solve the garbage problem, which we inherited from the Nepomuceno administration.” So declared Pamintuan over local radio.
So where did it go?
The city environment and natural resources office reported that the more than 20,000 tons of garbage was taken to the sanitary landfill in Montalban, Rizal via 1,117 hauling trips from April 2 to May 24.
Even as Pamintuan made good on his summit vow to clean the Pampanga MRF, he is emphatic in enjoining all the barangay officials to get their act together to strictly implement Republic Act 9003, or the Ecological Solid Waste Management Act in their respective villages.
“The focal persons in the waste management program are the barangay officials,” Pamintuan stressed, as he urged them to likewise allot a portion of their respective budget to fund their solid waste management program focused on segregation of waste at source, that is “start at the households by using separate trashcans for recyclables and residuals, and composting for biodegradables.”
A long way to go for the city to be truly garbage-free. But with its mayor showing some political will, there is no reason not to believe it can be done.
