“We can assure the public that the wastes in the 26 vans which we have processed were all recyclables and had no toxic materials, not even adult diapers,” MCWMC General Manager Darwin Chan told Punto in a telephone interview.
Chan said the photos and videos taken of the first batch of Canadian wastes would “attest to the contents of the container vans.”
He said that the wastes in the initial vans were buried in the landfill in the presence of representatives from the Environmental Management Bureau, local government (of Capas) and the Clark Development Corp.,” he said.
The process lasted from June 26 to July 8, he said, adding that it would also take two to three weeks to process and bury the wastes in 24 more container vans still in the Manila port.
Tarlac Gov. Victor Yap was earlier reported to have ordered the MCWMC to stop accepting the wastes which arrived from Canada in 2013, but Chan said the governor had lifted his order after the Bureau of Customs (BoC) showed him the required clearance from the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR).
“We can assure everyone there was no other wastes in the shipment what arrived at our facility. I can perhaps assume that the same is true for the wastes in the 24 other container vans what we await, because they also had clearance from the DENR,” he added.
Chan noted that about 60 percent of the wastes were recyclable, while the remaining 40 percent consisted of biodegradable wastes that included paper and cardboard. “”We do not accept toxic wastes in our facility,” he said, “If ever there was leacheate in the biodegradable materials, the leacheate happened in the Manila port where the vans containing the wastes were stalled for two years,” he noted.
He also cited records showing that the Canadian wastes were initially imported by a firm called Chronic Plastics Inc.
“But we now deal with the BoC because somehow, it became the owner of the wastes,” he stressed.
Chan said MCWMC charged BoC a total of P900 per ton of waste, instead of the regular P800 per ton because “we had to be more meticulous with the imported waste.”
The MCWMC website describes its landfill in Capas as “the first and only Waste Management Facility in the Philippines that fulfills not only the national environmental standards as specified in Republic Act 9003 called Solid Waste Management Act, as it fulfills furthermore the international standards as described in the Council Directive 1999/31/EC on the landfill of waste of the European Commission.”
