Groups urge authorities to stand by the pollution prevention goal of the Clean Air

As the nation marks the 12th anniversary of the signing of Republic Act 8749 Wednesday, campaigners for health, environmental and climate justice urged national and local authorities to duly enforce the ban on waste incineration.

In a common statement, the EcoWaste Coalition, the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA) and the Health Care Without Harm (HCWH) pressed lead government agencies such as the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, the Department of Health, the Department of Science and Technology, as well as local government units (LGUs), to be faithful with the spirit and intent of the law.

Signed by then President Joseph Estrada, R.A. 8749, or the Clean Air Act of 1999, is a wide-ranging air quality management law that seeks to protect the right of every person to breathe clean air by curbing emissions from various pollution sources.

Among the pollution prevention and reduction measures enshrined in R.A. 8749 is the ban on incinerators, which fall under the category of stationary sources of air pollutants, that “emit toxic and poisonous fumes.”

“For the nth time, we urge those accountable for bringing into fruition the promise of safe and healthy environment under R.A. 8749 not to be remiss in their duty of enforcing the incineration ban,” said Roy Alvarez, President, EcoWaste Coalition.

“Despite the availability of economical and environmentally-safe methods of discards management, we are stunned to find public officials from Benguet to Butuan lured into patronizing costly incinerators peddled as viable solutions to garbage woes,” noted GAIA campaigner Paeng Lopez.

“Even some health officials seem to be oblivious to the fact that healthcare waste incineration is out-of-date given the commercial accessibility to different types and sizes of non-burn technologies, such as autoclave and microwave, for killing pathogens in infected waste,” stated Merci Ferrer, Director, HCWH-Southeast Asia.

The groups asked institutions and LGUs being targeted by incinerator vendors to focus their time, energy and financial resources in fully implementing waste prevention and reduction programs, accompanied with active public information and education drive.

Such programs, according to the groups, must include segregation at source, reusing, recycling and composting, as well as other methods for cutting the volume and toxicity of discards, including “upstream” approaches like clean production and extended producer responsibility.

“Any time incinerator peddlers throw scifi-sounding nouns and adjectives to go along words such as plasma, gasification, or pyrolysis to make their technologies sound hi-tech, please remember that those are fundamentally incinerators in varying disguises,” added Lopez.

The groups emphasized that the ban on waste incineration, which has been reaffirmed in another law (R.A. 9003, or the Ecological Solid Waste Management Act of 2000), is a valuable environmental policy that has, among others, prevented valuable materials from being turned into toxic ash, reduced the discharge of harmful by-products from combustion processes, and averted the squander of public money for costly, imported and superfluous materials destruction technology.

Citing the GAIA factsheet on “Incinerators: Myths and Facts,” the groups reiterated the following points debunking the safeness and soundness of garbage incinerators:

1. Municipal waste is non-renewable, consisting of discarded materials such as paper, plastic and glass that are derived from finite natural resources such as forests that are being depleted at unsustainable rates.

2. All incinerators pose considerable risk to the health and environment of frontline communities as well as that of the general population. Even the most technologically advanced incinerators release thousands of pollutants that contaminate our air, soil and water.

3.Burning waste contributes to climate change since incinerators emit more carbon dioxide (CO2) per unit of electricity (2988 lbs/MWh) than coal-fired power plants. (2249 lbs/MWh).

4.All incinerators are a massive waste of energy. Due to the low calorific value of waste, incinerators are only able to capture small amounts of energy while destroying large amounts of reusable materials.

5.Incinerators burn local jobs, requiring huge capital investment, but they offer relatively few jobs when compared to recycling.

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Environmental groups urge LGUs to extinguish fires from open burning

Environmental groups have pressed local government units (LGUs) to seriously enforce the prohibition against open burning to conserve resources and curb toxic pollution.

EcoWaste Coalition and the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA) jointly push for the stringent implementation of the open burning ban under Republic Act No. 9003 and R.A. 8749 as the whole nation observes “Fire Prevention Month” this March.

"With public support, the LGUs can extinguish these often-ignored 'small' but similarly detrimental fires from the open burning of waste materials," the groups said.

Both R.A. 9003, the Ecological Solid Waste Management Act, and R.A. 8749, the Clean Air Act, prohibit open burning of waste materials to address the decline of environmental quality, which directly impacts public health.

“Despite clear and explicit proscriptions under our foremost environmental laws, we still find open burning practised with impunity in both rural and urban areas,” said Roy Alvarez, president, EcoWaste Coalition.

“We see valuable resources, such as materials that can be re-used, recycled or composted, transformed into noxious fumes and ashes in disposal sites, farms, street corners, backyards and even in parks," he said.

On top of being wasteful, open burning produces a cocktail of health-damaging chemicals depending on what is burned.

The groups reiterated that R.A. 9003 and R.A. 8749 provide clear, adequate and strong basis for heightened LGU action against open burning.

R.A. 9003 bans the open burning of solid waste as in the case of traditional “siga” and penalizes violators with a fine ranging from P300 to P1,000, or a one- to 15-day imprisonment, or both.

R.A. 8749 states that “no person, establishment, firm, company, government or private entity or organizations shall be allowed to burn or cause open burning of waste materials in their premises, area of jurisdiction, including recognized or unrecognized dumpsites in any quality or quantity.”

The “waste materials” referred to under R.A. 8749 cover “plastic, polyvinyl chloride, polypropylene, paints, ink, wastes containing heavy metals, organic chemicals, petroleum related compound, industrial wastes, ozone depleting substances and other similar toxic and hazardous substances.”

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Bottomless well

THIS week, the nation marked the 10th anniversary of Republic Act (RA) 9003, or the Ecological Solid Waste Management Act of 2000. It came at a time when renewed concern over the large-scale damage from a combination of uncollected, untreated, unsegregated waste on the one hand, and Ondoy-level flooding on the other, is rising amid debates on continuing climate risks. It also came as debate started to heat up over the unprecedented implementation of a citywide ordinance, the first in the country, banning the use of plastic bags in Muntinlupa City, as part of efforts to reduce the risk of flooding from plastic bags clogging riverways and drainage system.



On the date that the EcoWaste Coalition called attention to the dismal failure of authorities to enforce RA 9003, the Federation of Philippine Industries (FPI), one of the biggest and most articulate business groups in the country, also warned authorities against the unintended consequences of the Muntinlupa prohibition on plastics, saying it could cause severe economic losses—including the displacement of 175,000 workers—without actually reducing the risk from flooding.


According to FPI chairman Jesus Arranza, instead of an outright ban on plastic bags, authorities should instead focus on improving the waste-recovery and recycling programs from the barangay level up to the national government. He cited England as an example, where the world’s largest recycling facility was set up from the proceeds of selling recovered waste. England may seem to be a far-fetched ambition for now, but there’s no reason we should not aspire to improve on what is, in fact, already being done—albeit with little government support—by the network of segregators, collectors and recyclers in some areas that has taken to heart the mandate of the solid-waste act enacted 10 years ago. Local plastic makers, Arranza said, are very willing to buy the plastic waste, and local government units (LGUs) simply have to come up with effective schemes to collect those recyclable plastic items. This way, not only do drainage systems and waterways get spared from clogged plastic items, the villages also get revenue from selling the items for recycling. The plastic makers can have ready inputs for production and thus, cut resin importation, allowing the country to save on foreign currency. In short, it’s a win-win situation for all, if only those charged to enforce the law, the LGUs primarily, do their job.


But as the record of the past decade shows, implementing a law that took so much time and effort to craft seems to have been an idle wish. The law, signed on January 26, 2001, promised a healthy and sustainable environment, through segregation, recycling and composting to reduce waste.


“The 10-year-old law apparently has not developed into maturity despite its age, considering the garbage and waste crisis the country is in today. What is very depressing is the utter lack of serious implementation of this law, as evidenced by the wanton violations of its major provisions everywhere.” That’s the lament of Roy Alvarez, president of EcoWaste.


Data from the National Solid Waste Management Commission, said EcoWaste, shows that despite the law’s mandate to close down all open dumps by February of 2004, at least 790 open dumps remain in operation. And, while all controlled dumps should have been closed by February 2006, there are 382 controlled dumps still operating—three more than there were in 2009.


According to EcoWaste, little progress is seen in the law’s mandate to set up materials-recovery facilities, or MRFs. There are only 6,957 MRFs, serving barely a fifth, or 7,938, of the more than 42,000 barangays.


EcoWaste also deplores the “sanitary” landfills in areas prohibited by law—and notwithstanding objections by affected communities—such as the San Mateo Landfill in Rizal, the Ternate Landfill on Mount Palay-Palay in Cavite, and the VGP Landfill in San Jose del Monte, Bulacan.


Add to this litany of disgusting statistics the explicit violations on specific prohibited acts, as noted by EcoWaste: littering; open burning; open dumping; construction of dumps in environmentally critical areas; and the manufacture, distribution, use or importation of non-environmentally acceptable products and services, remain unchecked, if not ignored by those who are supposed to implement the law.


Ten years down the road from 2001, we are presented with yet another glaring illustration of our penchant for enacting good laws without bothering to enforce them, or fund their implementation. Offhand, the Muntinlupa ordinance banning plastics is good because it demonstrates political will and a desire to effect lifestyle change in a particular community. Yet, the FPI has a point in saying that an outright ban on plastics won’t reduce the risks of flooding unless the salient parts of the solid-waste law are seriously implemented—this, while creating the collateral damage on the workers in the plastics and recycling sector.


Perhaps it’s time for the Department of Environment and Natural Resources to once and for all throw the book at all LGUs that fail to implement RA 9003. All those governors, mayors and barangay officials who got elected last year should be compelled to pursue segregation, materials recovery and recycling among their constituencies as soon as possible. Unless they are forced to do so, all this talk about reducing the impact from climate risk will go nowhere and will merely mean throwing good money down a bottomless well of misery.

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