The collapse of a massive mountain of trash in the southern province of Cebu in the Visayas region of the Philippines lays bare the flaws of the country’s waste management system, which spans decades of neglect, say environmentalists.
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On 8 January, a mound of garbage toppled from about 20 storeys high at the Binaliw Landfill, a privately operated facility that handles refuse for Cebu City, the second largest metropolitan area in the country after Metro Manila.
The collapse has buried about 50 waste workers, leaving 8 dead and dozens missing at the time of writing.
“This [incident] shows a grim picture of our broken waste management system that has failed Filipinos and communities once again. We could have prevented this from happening if only the root cause of waste and pollution had been addressed decades ago,” said Marian Ledesma, campaigner for watchdog Greenpeace.
Ledesma recounted how the incident is reminiscent of the Payatas garbage dump landslide in Quezon City in Metro Manila in 2000, which occurred after days of nonstop rains that triggered a 50-foot wall of trash to collapse and bury hundreds of people alive.
“Incidents like these are bound to happen again as long as the government continues to allow the overproduction of residual waste, particularly single-use plastics,” Ledesma said in a statement.
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If a city like Cebu insists on a purely centralised setup – attempting to solve the waste problems of 80 barangays through one facility – it is bound to fail.
Lito Vasquez, senior executive officer and policy advisor of the Philippine Movement for Climate Justice (PMCJ) - Visayas Region
Cebu stands out as a major waste producer in the Philippines due to its rapid urbanisation, booming population and high tourism activity, which drive the generation of more than 700 tonnes of solid waste daily.
The Philippines has been found to be the biggest contributor to plastic pollution in the ocean, as it allows some 0.75 million metric tonnes of mismanaged plastic to enter the ocean every year.
Lito Vasquez, senior executive officer and policy advisor of the Philippine Movement for Climate Justice (PMCJ) Visayas said the Binaliw facility was granted an environmental compliance certificate in 2017 to operate as a landfill, which buries waste material by covering it with soil, among other measures. However its actual operation became an open dumpsite, which is prohibited by local solid waste management law, prompted by the Payatas tragedy, he noted.
This neglect has allowed unsafe practices to become routine, such as local government units delivering biodegradable wastes to the facility when they should have been segregated already in their respective districts, he said.
Binaliw is where around 200 garbage trucks dump the city’s waste daily, overwhelming the facility’s materials recovery facility (MRF). As a result, more waste is dumped directly without processing, worsening environmental and health risks, he added.
“An effective solid waste management plan must prioritise the empowerment of barangays [the smallest level of local government], ensuring that only residual wastes are collected and disposed of in landfills. If a city like Cebu insists on a purely centralised setup – attempting to solve the waste problems of 80 barangays through one facility – it is bound to fail,” Vasquez told Eco-Business.
Cebu city mayor Nestor Archival said in an online press briefing on Monday that there will be a need to call for a state of calamity in the Binaliw area, to help with financing in transporting the city’s waste to alternative sites. The city faces a daily garbage volume of 500,000 kilos and a deficit of P500 million (US$8.4 million) for garbage collection.
“We have a crisis. We have concerns. I’m appealing to big establishments to do your own garbage management for now, and the same time for the constituency to do garbage segregation because it is one way of not bringing waste to the landfill,” said Archival.
Just before the landslide, Cebu City announced in December it would begin enforcing the “no segregation, no collection” to curb the city’s long-standing garbage problem.
