The Department of Environment and Natural Resources has reaffirmed its plan to include garbage pickers and scavengers in government programs, which could ensure a steady source of income as entrepreneurs.
“This sector is still locked out of the value chain of solid waste management, but they are in fact, critical and essential as part of the supply chain,” Environment Secretary Maria Antonia Yulo Loyzaga said during a recent World Wildlife Fund for Nature event.
The so-called informal waste sector, composed of waste pickers in dumps and trash collection points in communities, is vital in the country’s waste management and segregation. However, they are often excluded in policy discussions, and even in the Ecological Solid Waste Management Act of 2000, whose implementing rules and regulations banned the “unauthorized removal of recyclable material intended for collection by authorized persons.”
In 2010, the National Solid Waste Management Commission adopted a national framework plant to empower trash pickers who are considered “critical actors” in supporting the operation in an environmentally acceptable solid waste management system, including segregation, collection, transfer, treatment, and disposal.
The enactment of the Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) Act of 2022, Loyzaga saw an opportunity to include waste pickers in government programs to ensure that their rights would be protected.
This could be done by tapping local governments to conduct literacy programs and develop entrepreneurial skills, as well as implementing a system of data recording, tracking, and reporting on the informal waste sector.
Loyzaga stressed the vital role of waste collection and management sector, saying that it was the “backbone of the currently limited collection services and partly of recycling” in the country. She thinks informal sector could be integrated as business partners through nongovernmental organization supported microenterprises, franchises of waste management companies, operation of local collection centers, and formation of cooperatives.
Despite their massive contribution to the country’s almost non-existent solid waste management and recycling program, the country’s garbage pickers and scavengers have long been ignored by both government and society.
Now that they are finally being given attention by the DENR, their integration into the system, which can make it more efficient and humane, especially if they are granted benefits and protections that should be due, considering the honest work that they do that ultimately benefits the environment, will hopefully improve solid waste management systems all across the country.*
