Garbage — political and otherwise
| DIE HARD III |
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| Herman Tiu Laurel |
Exasperated with the politics in our country and writing without any hope of any constructive responses from the system, I took some time off to find solace in the development of my own small, hilly nine-hectare farm. The singkamas (jicama) didn’t grow as planned this season with the overdose of rain the past months; but with more sun these days, they’re beginning to catch up again. The luya (ginger), meantime, I hope will keep on schedule, as they’re slated for harvesting by the end of the month.
The orchard is growing well. After years of patient planting and fighting off brush fires that have thrice decimated our mangoes, we’re finally seeing a few hundred trees growing shoulder high. We’ve also got suha (pomelo), guyabano (soursop), calamansi (Philippine lemon), and a dozen more varieties growing; but since we’re averse to using chemically-synthesized farming aids, the problem now is where to get enough organic fertilizers and soil conditioners.
This dilemma then brought me to study many alternatives, including tapping the poultries around the area; but the entire supply of chicken manure had already been reserved for a Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) jatropha experimental farm in the same barangay.
Serendipitously, I had scheduled a cable TV interview with one of our national science and technology institutes and called for a pre-interview visit of its facilities and projects. One of the items I had in mind was to observe the “bioreactor” that converts market waste to soil conditioner and, with a higher addition of dry matter that increases the carbon-to-nitrogen (C:N) ratio, its production of fertilizer. Imagine, how much fertilizer we can possibly produce from converting all the market waste of Metro Manila!
Once there, I was toured around the institute’s many projects, including an experiment on the combination of animal waste with ground-up and dried water hyacinths (water lilies) to produce methane. Then, I was informed of another experiment — a floating shredder for water lilies that can churn and grind the prolific water pest to compact dust for easy transport and use.
When it came to the market waste bioreactor that I was most keen about, I was shown three units and one was covered in canvass, apparently waiting to be delivered. I then learned that it was a unit supposed to have been delivered to a Metro Manila city that was all set for operation when city council members intervened and asked for guarantees, such as on public nuisance complaints, etc., which I thought should be the city’s area of responsibility, being a local government-owned equipment.
The use of this market waste bioreactor would have reduced market waste hauling for up to 90 percent. That apparently is why the city council kept putting obstacles on the device’s way to the markets. It is common knowledge that garbage hauling contracts are one of the main sources of “sidelines” of insatiable city politicians.
These pols are the political garbage that our society still has found no way of disposing. Proliferating from way up in Malacañang down to the lowliest of barangays, they accumulate, grow and clog up the entire social system into stagnation and teeming rot.
And while the said city officials continue to block such a worthwhile project, Malacañang officials, for their part, block budgetary spending, waiting for their own contractors in the Public-Private Partnership (PPP) projects — this, as senators and Philippine National Police (PNP) brass block the real prosecution of the former First Couple in the choppers mess and other scams.
One hopeful development on garbage disposal comes from the revival of an old advocacy of mine — the garbage incinerator. The Clean Air Act and its Implementing Rules and Regulations inserted inane provisions that practically banned municipal incinerators in the Philippines, leading to the horrendous garbage problem all over the country, not to mention repeated deaths in garbage landslides, like Payatas in 2000 (which killed 200) and, recently, the one in Baguio that killed five.
Good thing we received this news from Sen. Antonio Trillanes’ media officer, Careen Sapallo: “(In eyeing the) use of incinerators to address… the worsening problem of waste disposal in the country… (Trillanes) filed Senate Bill 225 to revise the law signed in 1999 in light of the ‘trashslide’ set off by heavy rains in Baguio City… (It is a system supported by) advances in emission control designs, along with strict standards and monitoring system, (which) have caused large reduction of pollution in the atmosphere.”
This “new” technology (which I had studied a decade ago) involves the use ceramic filters, catalytic burners, and high heat after-burners in reducing the problem of dioxin emissions to insignificant amounts. And because backyard (or street-side) burning of garbage is the one that produces the most amounts of uncontrolled toxic emissions, municipal incineration aided by new technology thus becomes all the more imperative.
Frankly, the Clean Air Act was a product of ignorance perpetrated by the anti-development, green and global warming scare mongers as well as the electricity oligarchs who wanted no cheap competition from incinerator-generated power. Now, if only we can build an incinerator that will burn to a crisp those dirty politicians and oligarchs on sight, that would be a first!
(Tune in to Sulo ng Pilipino/Radyo OpinYon, Monday to Friday, 5 to 6 p.m. on 1098AM; Talk News TV with HTL, Saturday, 8:15 to 9 p.m., with replay at 11 p.m., on GNN, Destiny Cable Channel 8 on “Sci-Tech Innovations: Key to Filipinos’ Economic Emancipation”; visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com for our articles plus TV and radio archives)
(Reprinted with permission from Mr. Herman Tiu-Laurel)
Source: The Daily Tribune
URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20110909com6.html
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