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| ON THE OTHER HAND |
| The Best Solution to Garbage By Antonio C. Abaya December 6, 2001 The endless debate over how to solve the garbage problem amuses me no end because there is much passionate discourse in favor or against certain proposals, but very little practical commonsense when it comes to the nitty gritty. For example, there have been at least a dozen proposals in the past year or so to truck Metro Manila�s garbage to Atimonan (Quezon), to some place in Zambales, to another place in the foothills of the Sierra Madre in Bulacan; or to barge it to Semirara Island, to Mindoro, to Marinduque, and now to Bataan. It apparently never occurred to the advocates of these proposals that moving the garbage from Payatas or San Mateo to another place on the planet does not solve the problem; it merely moves that problem to another location. And then there are the zealots adamantly opposed to incinerators and apparently infatuated with composting as the first and last word in sold waste management. As I wrote in a previous article, they seem to be blissfully unaware that methane gas (the inevitable by-product of composting) is known to be 21 times more contributory to global warming than carbon dioxide (the inevitable by-product of incineration), according to no less than Dr. James Hansen, director of the Godard Institute for Space Studies of NASA and founding high priest of the Global Warming religion. Today Columnist Dan Mariano, quoting Von Hernandez of the eternally cantankerous Greenpiss, wrote an entire column on the theme that �incinerators are a magnet for corruption.� I have news for Dan and Von: EVERYTHING but EVERYTHING in the Philippines is a magnet for corruption: textbooks, fire engines, rice stocks, telecom frequencies, military uniforms, to name only a few. Should we therefore be content to raise illiterate children, fight fires only with tabo, stop eating rice, do away with radio and television like the Taliban, and have our soldiers go into combat stark naked? I am no great fan of incinerators, but the sloppy thinking � and even non-thinking � that accompanies much of the rhetoric against them is grating. Besides, as I previously asked, if incinerators are good enough for the Singaporeans, who have built the cleanest country in all Asia, why are they not good enough for the Filipinos, who have built one of the shabbiest? Can an anti-incinerator Taliban please answer that? ***** I met with outgoing PMS chief Vicky Garchitorena end of November to give the Arroyo Government some ideas in solid waste disposal and traffic management. I told her about how the city of Melbourne disposes of its garbage, on which I was given a briefing in 1995, when I was an invited speaker in an international conference on �Cities and the New Global Economy,� sponsored by the OECD and the Federal Government of Australia. After the recyclables are segregated, mostly and ideally at source, Melbourne�s garbage is trucked to a transfer station in nearby Sunshine City, where it is compacted by a hydraulic press to a uniform block to fit a 20-foot container. Each block of compacted garbage is rolled into a container rig and then transported to a sanitary landfill where blocks are laid out in neat rows. None of the burara, helter-skelter, Dante�s Inferno scene that one finds in Payatas or Smokey Mountain. (A typical truckload of Metro Manila�s garbage can be compacted to a block the size of an office desk. Aside from being neat and tidy, compacting the garbage seals in most of the foul odor and would make the waste impervious to scavenging by dogs, rats and humans). As blocks of compacted garbage fill up a row, a bulldozer pushes earth to cover that row. This eliminates what little odor is generated and keeps out flies, mosquitoes and other vermin. After three weeks, pipes are driven into the compacted and earth-covered garbage to suck out the methane and other gases generated by the anaerobic digestion of organic matter. The gas effluent passes through a chemical cleansing process to remove unwanted gases and the resulting purified methane is burned as fuel in a nearby generator to generate electricity, which is fed into the grid. The methane-fed generator in Melbourne has a rated capacity of 8mw, and was built at a cost of A$25 million. ***** I told Vicky that the Melbourne model can be adopted for Metro Manila, with the following modifications: There should be at least two transfer stations for compacting the incoming garbage, one north of the Pasig river, the other south of it, and the transfer stations should be on government-owned land near the existing tracks of the Philippine National Railway in order to keep costs down. Smokey Mountain in Tondo and the Food Terminal complex in Bicutan look ideal. The compacted garbage should be transported to the landfill on board flatcars or box cars of the PNR, which are much cheaper than by trucks or barges. The landfill should also be on government-owned land, to keep costs down, and should be accessible by railway spur from the South Line or North Line of the PNR. As one landfill becomes saturated, the landfill and generating plant are just moved a few kilometers down along the same PNR line, all the way to Bicol or La Union. This can theoretically keep on going for hundreds of years. To overcome the not-in-my-backyard or NIMBY Syndrome, residents of the barangays in which the landfill-generating plant will be located should be offered substantial discounts in their electric bills and charged only low nominal fees for the use of communal cooking facilities. (Yes, Virginia, methane gas can also be used for cooking). I do not know if I have convinced Vicky of the merits of this alternative model. But President Arroyo should seriously consider it, and civil society organizations should press her to do so. Vicky seems to favor the proposal submitted by a company called Waste Management Industries Inc. (WMII), which wants to barge the garbage to a landfill located on their 300-hectare property in Barrio Kinawan in Bagac, Bataan, some 100 kilometers from a their proposed transfer station in Navotas. This is a weak proposal as a) barging anything over a distance of 100 kilometers is more expensive than transporting same by railway; b) the landfill will be on a privately-owned property, which means it is factored into the cost; and c) there is no provision for utilizing the methane generated for socially beneficial purposes like generating power or cooking gas, hence there will be local opposition to it, as in fact there has been. Furthermore, what or who will stop the WMII from dumping some of the garbage into Manila Bay or the South China Sea in order to cut costs and increase their profits? At least, if transported by railway, any dumping along the way can easily be spotted and reported. ***** This article appeared in the December 24, 2001 issue of the Philippine Weekly Graphic magazine. |