The death toll from the Binaliw landfill landslide at Cebu City has increased to eight as of yesterday, while 28 remain missing and 18 people have been hospitalized following the incident that occurred at a waste management facility of Prime Waste Solutions Cebu in Barangay Binaliw last Thursday.
According to officials, the landslide was caused by factors like rain softening the soil, the September 30 earthquake causing the movement of rock formations, and the landfill being operating beyond its capacity.
The incident is reminiscent of the Payatas dumpsite tragedy in 2000, where more than 200 residents died, mostly trash pickers, after a portion of the garbage dump collapsed.
Following the Payatas tragedy, the Ecological Solid Waste Management Act of 2000 (Republic Act 9003) was passed, and it was primarily designed to ensure waste prevention through reduction and segregation at source, but as most Filipinos know from experience, none of that has happened and although some LGUs now have sanitary landfills, we still treat them as open dumpsites where unsorted waste is indiscriminately dumped by Filipinos who couldn’t be bothered to sort, segregate, recycle, or reuse. For most of us, our civic duty when it comes to trash is to just leave it outside for the garbage men to pick up, and to start complaining loudly if they don’t do it.
What Cebu has been doing, which is send tons upon tons of mixed waste to landfills or dumps and then hoping to forget about it, is what most of our towns and cities are also doing as far as our trash is concerned.
That kind of system ensures that there will be waste pickers at the dumps, doing what we should’ve done from the start, which is to sort and segregate the waste at the source. However, due to our collective and irresponsible laziness, we cannot be bothered with sorting our waste so we leave it to either the garbage collectors or waste pickers to do that part. They pick out the recyclables and reusables from our waste to eke out a decent living, which means that their livelihood is tied to the dumpsite, which is not only unnecessary if only we did our part, but also quite dangerous for them, as demonstrated by Binaliw and Payatas.
My previous article discussed this issue, in the context of Bacolod City’s recent trash collection problem, and last week’s landfill landslide just added an exclamation point to the need for us to segregate at the source. We can complain all we want when the garbage collection fails, but if we fail to do our part from the very start, we are still a major part of the garbage problem.
If we were only capable of doing our part, which is to segregate from the source, then there would be less reason for a deadly landfill landslide to occur. If the trash sent to a landfill were already segregated and sorted, there wouldn’t be need for any waste pickers to be risking their health and lives there, because residual trash has no value for them.
Furthermore, trash that is already segregated has a lesser volume than unsorted trash, and at the same time produces less pollution and leachate. That means that a city whose people segregate their trash at the source will generate less trash, which gives their landfills a longer service life while at the same time generating less harmful byproducts. All while being safer because there are no more humans living and working at the dumpsites, doing the simple sorting that the law demands but we do not want to do and can get away with it because our local governments don’t care and choose not to enforce.
As long as there are poorly managed solid waste management systems with ‘landfills’ that are run like Binaliw and Payatas, those dumps are a constant danger to the community. Aside from the risks that waste pickers take by working on unstable and trashy ground, these dumps also produce leachate that pollutes water sources and stinks up the community, aside from being a breeding ground for all sorts of health risks. If you come to think of it, almost all dump sites in the country are most likely run the same way.
While the local government unit should take up most of the blame, especially for allowing dump sites to be run that way, and for failing to enforce the law that obliges us to segregate our trash at the source, we should also take a long hard look at our own households and how we deal with our trash. We don’t need to have a PHD to be able to know how to segregate at the source.
Our mindset when it comes to trash has to change. Simply wishing it to disappear after we leave it outside for the garbage collectors has never been enough. We need to do our share so our waste doesn’t overwhelm our communities or endanger the communities that host our landfills. Perhaps it is time to start learning how to segregate our waste.*
