Local Officials Profit from Garbage

Local Officials Profit from Garbage
by MARITES N. SISON


CARMONA, CAVITE—Romy Masungsong, a farmer at Bgy. Lantic, in Carmona's Sitio Paligawang Matanda, always looks forward to a heavy downpour.

It is not only because the rains are good for his crops. More importantly, it gives him and at least 50 other families a chance to collect water for their daily needs. Otherwise, he says, they would have to spend at least P800 each a month for water that is delivered to them by truck.

Masungsong and the other residents of Bgy. Lantic actually live near the Mename and Manggahan Rivers and more than 100 springs. But while these rivers and springs are still flowing, they have become so contaminated with heavy metals like chromium, iron and lead that Lantic residents have stopped using the very same water supply that had served generations of their families.

"These heavy metals are the type of pollutants that build up in the food chain," says Greenpeace-Southeast Asia regional director Von Hernandez. "Chromium and lead are toxic to human beings and aquatic life. Lead is a potent neurotoxin while chromium has been associated with various cancers and birth defects."

The pollution of the rivers and springs here is only one of the painful legacies of a sanitary landfill that used to be in operation in the heart of Sitio Paligawang Matanda. The landfill was closed in 1998, or five years after it was opened on May 17, 1993.

Compared to open dumpsites like that in Payatas or even controlled dumpsites such as the ones planned in Mariveles, Bataan and Semirara, Antique, sanitary landfills are supposed to be a better way of getting rid of tons of trash. After all, in landfills, the garbage is not only buried in a lined pit, it is also covered and then sprayed with chemicals.

The government, however, has a poor track record in maintaining landfills, resulting in ecological disasters such as what has happened here in Sitio Paligawang Matanda. Yet government officials insist on this garbage disposal method and other alternatives that pose even greater health and environmental risks because, says Hernandez, "that's where the money is."

Former Metro Manila Administration Commissioner for Operations Edgardo Cayton says as much, adding that the biggest gainers are usually the contract awardees—the private haulers that get the lucrative contracts to collect and dispose garbage—as well as the public officials who receive kickbacks in exchange for having awarded the contract.

The going rate for this "cut" ranges from 10 to 40 percent, but Cayton says there are others who opt for a monthly retainer, shares of stock in companies or a seat for a relative in the board of the company that bagged the contract.

One contractor recalls the time he and other garbage operators had to line up in a room at the former Asian Institute of Tourism Hotel, each of them bearing an envelope containing the monthly "contribution" being collected by a high-ranking official's relative.

Some public officials, meanwhile, have been rumored to own some of the private collecting firms themselves. There are also those who are said to maintain "special relationships" with contractors, as in the case of one Metro Manila municipality, where the garbage contract was awarded to a company owned by the mayor's girlfriend.

On the disposal side, contractors may also decide to offer "protection money" to the officials of the municipality slated to host a landfill or dumpsite just so the operations are impeded. In the case of Carmona, though, Vice Mayor Eloisa Tolentino recalls that it was a member of the now defunct Metropolitan Manila Authority (MMA) who boldly offered her P150,000 a month for 10 months "just to shut up."

At that time, Tolentino, then a councilor, was the leader of a local movement trying to block the construction and operation of the landfill there. She recalls, "Ang sabi sa akin, tumahimik lang daw ako okay na. Puwede pa akong isama sa soil cover. Ang pera maari ko raw gamitin para sa mga projects ko. (I was told that if I kept quiet, everything would be okay. I could even be included in the soil cover expenses. The money I could then use for my projects.)"

She explains that money was to be made by the delivery of "ghost soil"—meaning that funds would be collected for soil taken just from the other side of the landfill. Later on, however, there were even times when there would be no soil cover at all, a violation of the Environmental Compliance Certificate (ECC) issued by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) for the Carmona landfill.

Cayton and garbage contractors also talk of "ghost trips" as yet another way to milk more money out of garbage deals. Payment for garbage hauling contracts are normally based on volume collections and trips made by contractors per day. Cayton says a contractor can simply pad the number of trips his trucks make and share the profit with local officials.

But Cayton says that "the mother of all scams," at least in garbage collection, is "to plan or program emergencies so that you come up with expensive solutions." As Cayton describes it, the "ideal situation" for making money is when a full-blown problem of garbage piling up in the streets gives rise to a solution that calls on local governments "to hire and hire more trucks and make more trips."

This has been especially so since 1992, when the Local Government Code assigned the collection and transport to local government units. This set-up is used even in Metro Manila, although it is the Metro Manila Development Authority (MMDA) that takes care of the disposal of garbage as well as the operation of disposal sites and transfer stations for the metropolis.

Cayton says the devolved arrangement—also adopted during the Marcos years—has become a major source of graft and corruption. This is because it leaves no room for accountability. In truth, a local government is left to its own devices and can allocate as much money as it wants for waste management without really having to explain the costs involved. Huge sums of money have been set aside by local governments in Metro Manila for garbage collection alone. The city of Manila, for instance, spends as much as 18 percent of its total budget for it.

Among the problems that have emerged because of this are contracts that are not in the best interests of the local government involved. Garbage deals forged under the Solid Waste Management Program of the municipality of San Juan, for example, are described in a Commission on Audit (COA) report released last year as being "open-ended" and containing "ambiguous terms and conditions detrimental to the municipal government."

San Juan, whose mayor, Jose 'Jinggoy' Estrada, is former President Joseph Estrada's son, has garbage contracts with Greenline Envirotech, Metrowide Movers and Services and REN Transport. According to the COA report, while the agreements stated the number of trucks to be provided by each contractor, they were "silent as to the number of trips to be made."

And since the contractor "is not obligated to perform a number of trips during the day, the trucks may stay idle waiting for further deployment or may service areas other than the municipality of San Juan, for a fee." REN Transport, for instance, also services Quezon City.

The report also notes that the contracts with Metrowide Movers and REN Transport "did not define their respective areas of assignment," making monitoring "difficult, if not impossible." The deals likewise failed to specify where the trucks would unload their contents and where the San Juan government had existing agreements for the use of a site for dumping.

This was important, says COA, since "the distance between the collection route and dumpsite justifies the contract price." Moreover, a municipality hosting a dumpsite charges a basic tax for every load of incoming waste, and such a fee would also have been factored in the agreed price. Without any site specified, a contractor may well choose to dump the trash illegally in vacant lots, rivers or creeks while claiming to have paid a fee to a host municipality.

Another interesting observation made by the COA is that the contracts likewise failed to specify the grounds for revoking or nullifying the agreement that would make the contractors aware of their duties and responsibilities. The Commission even says that the three contractors were allowed to claim their whole contract price "despite dismal performances" on several months.

Yet environmentalists say that all these would be moot if only the government thought of ways to avoid making waste in the first place instead of approaching the issue of garbage with the question, "Where do we put the trash?" This query, says Greenpeace's Hernandez, "leads almost always to mega back-end solutions" such as landfills and dumpsites.

For his part, former Flagships Projects Secretary Roberto Aventajado, who heads the Greater Metro Manila Solid Waste Management Committee, said he believes in the so-called "reduce, reuse, recycle" movements. He also said the Committee itself emphasizes these in its plans, albeit along with landfills and controlled dumpsites.

But Aventajado said the Committee has been forced to approach Metro Manila's present garbage crisis "backwards," concentrating on setting up a landfill first and foremost. Ideally, he said, waste management methods like recycling and composting should come first, but the "emergency situation" made this hard to do.

To be sure, though, even the MMDA has a study that says at least 80 percent of Metro Manila's waste can be recycled, including organic waste that be composted, and items such as plastics, bottles and paper. Another study, commissioned by Greenpeace Southeast Asia and done by the U.S.-based Institute of Local Self-Reliance, also shows that if Metro Manila implements a genuine waste reduction program, it would be able to recycle and compost at least 30 percent of its projected waste by 2005, and 60 percent by 2010.

Economically, said the study, "recycling can be less expensive than traditional disposal oriented systems. Recycling requires less capital and operating expenses. Furthermore, it sets the foundation for new recycling businesses and increased employment."

In fact, the small recycling industry in the country—which has tapped only six percent out of a potential 80 recyclable component in local garbage—is already valued at P1 billion annually and employs 40,000 to 50,000 people. This workforce includes the itinerant or street scavengers who scour garbage containers before they are picked by collectors; the collection crew or paleros hired by government agencies as refuse collectors who ride with garbage trucks and separate recyclables from waste; and dumpsite scavengers.

Another sworn local believer in the profitability of recycling is the Metro Manila Federation of Environment Multi-Purpose Cooperatives. In 1998, it sold 69,400 tons of waste materials to factories for P95.2 million in 1998. The next year, the 95,600 tons it had bought and collected fetched P124.6 million.

Hernandez says one way to further develop the recycling industry is by organizing recycling centers in every community. This, he says, will provide opportunities for scavengers to collect recyclables in a more organized, less dangerous and more humane way than the current practice of having to sift through a mountain of garbage or through refuse left on the streets and containers.

There are already bills pending in the Senate and House of Representatives that contain provisions mandating source separation programs, progressive recycling targets, bans on disposable packaging and development of recycling markets. For recycling to succeed, however, the government must develop the infrastructure and market for it, says Hernandez.

The MMDA, for instance, has an ordinance requiring households to segregate waste at source into two categories: non-biodegradable (includes recyclables like scrap iron, bottles, newspapers, plastics) and biodegradable. But because of politics and the absence of infrastructure to support it, as well as the lack of funds and coordination among the entities involved, the ordinance has not made any impact.

Hernandez also acknowledges that organizing communities, educating the public about the benefits of reducing, reusing, and recycling materials, as well as setting up systems to make them work takes time. "But so does the building of a new landfill," which, he points out, take anywhere from two to three years.

"The government always says we can't discipline Filipinos," he remarks. "But this was the same argument used by the waste management industry in the U.S. and Australia to discourage recycling. Yet the people did it anyway. That means people are willing to do it if they see the system working. But if you encourage people to separate the waste and a truck comes along and mixes everything up, the effort is wasted."

Public officials, says Hernandez, "need to have more faith in people than in companies and magic machines." They also need to put community interest above personal and financial interest.



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