`The idea is simple: Segregate plastics, paper, cardboard, bottles, tins, and food waste … Incentivize compliance with tax credits, cash rewards or groceries. Urge residents to be creative.’
IN his first day back at work last Tuesday as Manila mayor, Francisco “Isko Moreno” Domagoso said the garbage crisis in his city was 55 percent solved and that the situation would return to normal in three days.
Moreno blamed the crisis on the failure to pay trash contractors nearly a billion pesos for months. He said he would declare a health emergency, aware that the rainy season and the attendant floods threaten to complicate matters.
In resilience theory, two concepts illustrate the reaction to an emergency: coping and adaptive capacities. According to the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, coping capacity refers to the ability, “using available skills and resources, to manage adverse conditions, risk or disasters.”
In the case of Manila, the adverse condition would be the mounds of uncollected waste. The emergency or coping response would be collecting the trash as soon as possible, and addressing whatever health-related complications that might have arisen. Does City Hall have the leadership, the expertise, the funds, the personnel, the equipment to effect the timely and safe collection and disposal of the neglected waste? Given Mayor Moreno’s pronouncements, we think it does. We look forward to a reasonably clean city again soon and dream of ideal conditions for the near future.
Coping capacity is similar to how people might react in an accident. Do they know first aid? Do they know how to get additional help if it is necessary? Can they get the victim to the emergency room? Does the victim have health insurance? Do they have the means to pay for treatment?
The key word is react. While very important, coping capacity is reactive and sometimes leaves us worried and worrying, uncertain, unconfident, flatfooted.
Adaptive capacity, according to a 2022 UNDRR report, is the ability to “adjust or change its characteristics to moderate potential damage, take advantage of opportunities, cope with the consequences of shocks or stress, and implement adaptation options,” considering “sustainable, longer-term solutions.”
This can mean revising fiscal priorities, making sure funds are available for garbage collection, that garbage collectors are paid on time, that garbage contractors keep their end of the deal, that there are viable dumpsites for the collected trash and so on. In other words, what can be done so that we know what to do when it happens again. Better yet, so that it does not happen again. Or if it does, the effects will no longer be as bad.
Still on his first day, Mayor Isko issued Executive Order No. 3, directing “all barangay officials to lead the simultaneous declogging of canals and esteros, and cleaning of their streets, starting July 5 and every Saturday thereafter.”
He adds: “We will be consistent with this policy. We will be consistently implementing this policy. And I will provide you [with] consistent leadership for this policy.”
Reactivity will still be present in adapting, but there must be an element of proactivity. While laudable, the weekly declogging and cleaning program presumes that the garbage in question is not segregated and is thus dirty, malodorous and a health hazard. Perhaps Mayor Isko and the city council can step up further.
The good news is that the solution is already part of state policy. Republic Act No. 9003 (“The Ecological Waste Management Act of 2000”) underscores “solid waste avoidance and volume reduction through source reduction and waste minimization measures, including composing, recycling, re-use, recovery.”
The idea is simple: Segregate plastics, paper, cardboard, bottles, tins, and food waste. Clean and dry items that were used to contain grease, soap and the like. Incentivize compliance with tax credits, cash rewards or groceries. Urge residents to be creative.
However, the practice can be more complicated, and require instruction if not training. But it is feasible if not necessary. Here is where the local government itself can be creative.
Waste avoidance, segregation and recycling can lead to zero waste, and zero waste means zero garbage. Segregated waste can also be recovered, sold or recycled. The results will be rewarding: fresher air, refreshing sights, maybe even potable water from our currently disgusting waterways, lower costs. And definitely no more fly-infested uncollected trash.
That would be true adaptive capacity. And getting there should be just as fulfilling.
