As usual, Filipinos greeted the New Year with incredible revelry, upping the volume and leveling up the pyrotechnics. There is a firecracker ban in effect in the Philippines, in fact, but so many Filipinos did not seem to have received that memo. In my Pandacan neighborhood in Manila, people were still lighting up firecrackers on the streets just like old times. Nice, right?
Anyway, after all that, the Philippines woke up to this, as shared by the EcoWaste Coalition.
Here’s another set of photos of ‘holitrash’ (holiday + trash).
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Terrible. It makes me so ashamed to look at them. But all this trash is more than just a national embarrassment.
The waste and toxic watch group says that “waste becomes a threat to public health and the environment if it is not properly sorted out and managed in a safe manner that will not contaminate the surroundings, particularly the air we breathe, the water we drink, and our sources of food, including the rivers and the oceans.”
According to the National Solid Waste Management Commission, Metro Manila generates about 9,213 tons of garbage per day of which 52 percent are biodegradables, 41 percent recyclables and 7 percent residuals. The national waste generation is estimated at 40,087 tons per day.
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That’s a lot of waste and most of it can actually be composted or recycled if consumers had not thrown them out with the trash. If we segregate our trash properly, we wouldn’t be experiencing a garbage crisis, the group urges.
The group is also calling on companies to take responsibility for the waste generated from their products, the most notorious of which are the products with sachet packaging. Click here for their full statement and report.
Photo source: EcoWaste Coalition
How do we solve our growing garbage problem? Share your thoughts with us!
