The Pangasinan Star ONLINE

WINDOWS
Gabriel L. Cardinoza


The city’s garbage and how to properly dispose it continues to be the center of discussion in the city hall these past few days. It took center stage after piles of garbage had remained uncollected in many areas in the city, catching the attention of no less than Speaker Jose de Venecia Jr. during one of his visits here.

From what we’ve heard, the discussions are still in the finger-pointing stage – who did what and that and who’s to blame for this and that. The city’s waste management division (WMD), which has absorbed much of the blows for the mess, had maintained that it was no longer its job to collect the garbage. It’s now the barangays’, said WMD chief Reggie Ubando, citing RA 9003, which is perhaps today’s most quoted law of the land.

But the barangays, in quick defense, are blaming their residents for not cooperating. Under the law, households should segregate their garbage, sell the recyclables to a material recovery facility and take the rest to a compost pit. Reggie’s WMD will just collect the so-called residuals, or materials which cannot be recycled or composted. That’s that.

By now, there is no doubt that almost every household in the barangays is already aware of its duty to segregate after more than two years now of massive information dissemination campaign conducted by city hall. But whether most of these households know how to segregate or not is another story.

Well, a team of highly-paid city hall waste management consultants have done a series of seminars on segregation in every nook and cranny of the city in the last two years. Whether its lectures have sunk into the people’s consciousness can only be gauged by the city’s present state of the garbage.

What’s also beginning to complicate the situation are the malicious rumors that Reggie’s WMD will soon be abolished and the city’s waste management will be outsourced to a private company. These wild talks have demoralized WMD personnel.

Added to all these are the conflicts in the barangays about the garbage fees – that these are exorbitant and that there are no proper accounting of the collections, in many instances.

We have nowhere else to go but segregate. And we have yet to see a barangay in the city strictly enforcing segregation at source. We have yet to see a barangay patiently teaching its residents how and what to segregate – not on a single seminar but on a daily basis. Each barangay has to have its own team of volunteers to do this. The Sangguniang Kabataan can be tapped for this project.

We have to remember that we are breaking a bad habit. Making segregation as a habit is the challenge. With patience and determination, we can achieve this and we won’t have to even talk about garbage anymore in the future.

ENDNOTES: Dagupan City Vice Mayor Alvin Fernandez has just been appointed by President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo as member of the Consultative Commission to propose amendments to the 1987 Constitution. He is the only vice mayor in the 50-member commission, which is composed of academicians, newspaper columnists, former and incumbent national officials, mayors and governors and constitutionalists. Congratulations, vice mayor!

QUICKQUOTE: Become the change you want to see - those are words I live by. -- Oprah Winfrey.