There are many things one can look forward to in retirement. For Sonia Mendoza, chairman of Mother Earth Foundation (MEF), she looked forward to spending more time with her family and fully enjoying the sports she loves—tennis. After retiring as a laboratory manager of a multinational pharmaceutical company in 1984, Mendoza gained complete control over her time to enjoy bonding more with the family. She was also often seen at Philippine Columbian Association (PCA) indoor tennis courts. Then she joined club tournaments in Metro Manila and, sometimes, in nearby cities.
“I was a member of the PCA Seniors team that competed at the Mie Prefecture in Japan, sponsored by the Japan Senior Tennis Club,” Mendoza told the BusinessMirror in an e-mail interview.
New advocacy
Mendoza joined the Concerned Citizens Against Pollution (COCAP) in 1995. At that time, COCAP was campaigning for clean air, as there was a plan to put up an incinerator plant in the country. This was her first involvement in environmental issues. She attended hearings with a group of ladies led by Odette Alcantara at the Senate and at the House of Representatives when incineration issues were taken up. She also joined rallies at the Luneta, campaigning for clean air and for the passage of the Philippine Clean Air Act that bans incineration.
In 1998, Mendoza and four other housewives decided to take action when the garbage collectors failed to collect garbage in their village for three weeks. With Luz Sabas and Dr. Metodio Palaypay serving as their gurus on proper waste management, they started a waste segregation campaign. “The biodegradable [nabubulok] waste was composted and the non-biodegradable [di nabubulok] ones were sold to the junk shops to be sent back to the factories for recycling,” Mendoza said.
In 1998, a group of five men and 10 women environmentalists founded the MEF, and registered it at the Securities and Exchange Commission. Since then, the MEF has been teaching communities, schools, offices, and various sectors of society how to do recycling and proper waste management.
“No village was too small or too far for MEF to visit so we can teach them about ecological solid waste management. We were invited to hold seminars or speak in Metro Manila, Batangas, Cavite, Tagaytay, Dipolog, Surigao, Northern Samar, Romblon, Quezon, Bicol, Bacolod, Butuan, Iligan, Pampanga, Bulacan, Baguio, Bataan, Nueva Vizcaya, Nueva Ecija, and Ilocos Sur,” she said.
Although there are so many environmental challenges in the country, Mendoza said the Philippines is fortunate to have one of the better laws on solid waste management, Republic Act 9003, which was signed into law in January 2001. The law calls for the decentralization of solid waste management and mandates segregation of waste at source, segregated collection, and the establishment of a Materials Recovery Facility (MRF) in every barangay or in a cluster of barangays. However, Mendoza lamented that “implementation of this 19-year-old law is pathetic. Up to now, only about 30 percent of the 42,000 barangays have operational MRFs.”
What really helped MEF in teaching communities to segregate waste was the fact that the members walked the talk. “We segregate our waste at source, i.e., in the house, and plastic, especially single-use plastics are our pet peeves,” Mendoza said.
Now that the barangay is not doing the collection of biodegradable waste in their village, Mendoza and other villagers decided to compost their food waste in their respective backyards and give the recyclables and residual waste to the garbage trucks, properly segregated. Moreover, they also use reusable bags made of cloth or indigenous materials when doing their shopping. Usually, Mendoza and her colleagues don’t accept plastic bags and paper bags in the wet market and in the supermarkets.
“During the pandemic, while we still use our reusable bags when we go shopping, plastic packaging increased because most of the goods are delivered in the villages and most of the goods are in plastic bags.” But she said that in their project sites, segregated collection is still being implemented and the MRFs continue to operate.
Promoting recycling and waste management
TO promote recycling and waste management, the MEF training module has two parts: Inner Ecology and Solid Waste Management.
Inner Ecology answers the question “why”? Why do we have to take responsibility for the waste that we generate? What are the effects of mismanaging our waste, on health, and on the environment? The inputs from the trainees are heartwarming and inspiring. “We teach communities but we also learn from them,” Mendoza said.
The second part of the module answers the question “how”? This is where RA 9003 comes in, segregation at source, etc.
“The hierarchy of waste management is Reduce, Reuse, Recycle—also known as the 3 Rs. Now, they have added more Rs: Repair, Repurpose, Redesign,” she said.
Mendoza warned the public not to patronize false solutions such as eco-bricks, and cement co-processing using plastic waste as an alternative fuel, which are pipe solutions that do not address the root cause of the problem. “These will not stop the production of these problematic packaging. Instead, they give the plastic manufacturers good reason to continue their production. We need to turn off the faucet,” she said.
“There are stores now that offer alternative delivery systems, no extra packaging by having the consumers bring their own containers. MEF has started on this. We have one in Malabon, Batangas and Siquijor,” she added.
While MEF encourages recycling, Mendoza said their training emphasizes reduction or avoidance of waste. She said there’s a lot to be done, as only less than 9 percent of all plastic that has been manufactured has been recycled.
Partner communities
MEF partner communities are very supportive of their zero waste approach to waste management. Mendoza said the City of San Fernando, Pampanga (CSFP) is a zero-waste model city comprised of 35 barangays. MEF partnered with the city in 2012 and introduced the zero-waste program. San Fernando set the bar with more than 100 MRFs, way above the requirement of the law of one MRF per barangay. In 2012, the waste diversion rate of the city was 12 percent, meaning 12 percent of its total waste was diverted from the Clark Sanitary Landfill and the cost of waste disposal was P70 million per year.
After six months of implementing the zero waste project, the waste diversion rate increased to 53 percent. Now, the waste diversion rate is 80 percent, the highest in the country. Their cost of disposal to the landfill was down to P12 million, but it became P15 million due to the tipping fee increase.
“San Fernando is a Zero Waste model city up to the present and is acknowledged globally. We have partnered with the cities of Malabon, Navotas, Batangas, Tacloban, Taguig, and Siquijor and Nueva Vizcaya provinces,” Mendoza said.
Barangay Fort Bonifacio in Taguig City, Barangays Potrero, Dampalit, San Agustin, Concepcion, Hulong Dagat in Malabon City, Barangays Bagumbuhay North, Tanza 1, Tanza 2, Tangos North, North Bay Boulevard North in Navotas City are Zero Waste model barangays in Metro Manila. This means every household in these barangays do source segregation, have segregated collection, and the barangays have an operational MRF.
Tapping the youth
Mendoza said schools within the barangays are included in the zero-waste program and they have MRFs. We have three zero waste model schools—Holy Spirit Elementary School in Commonwealth, Quezon City, San Fernando Elementary School and St. Scholastica’s.
MEF also conducts a Zero Waste Youth Camp annually and a Zero Waste Olympiad participated by public and private schools in CSFP. Student volunteers from UP Manila helped in the IEC and waste collection in our different project sites after giving them training on ecological solid waste management. “Education is very important in developing environmental awareness,” Mendoza said.
Frustrations
MEF continues doing its work despite the lack of support from the national government and lack of political will to nationally implement a very important doable law.
“It’s frustrating that instead of helping clean the environment, government agencies like the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, National Solid Waste Management Commission, Department of Health, Department of Trade and Industry, and the Metropolitan Manila Development Authority are supporting harmful, expensive technologies such as Waste to Energy Incineration to cover up their inefficiency in implementing RA 9003,” Mendoza said.
She said the gravest threat right now is the much touted Waste to Energy Incineration Bill that will repeal the ban on incineration of the Clean Air Act and will allow burning of all kinds of waste, which will revert their zero waste program back to square one. “However, we are hopeful that our partner LGUs led by their mayors will continue the Zero Waste program after experiencing the positive results in their cities.”
A worthy cause
Despite the gargantuan challenges and frustrations they face, Mendoza said pursuing environmentalism is a worthy undertaking as it produces a healthy citizenry and helps conserve our finite resources for the future generation.
Mendoza said MEF finds joy in community organizing, creation of green jobs, seeing happy faces of the community waste workers, developing livelihood, and a self satisfaction that one is part of the solution.
Mendoza borrows a quote from Chief Seattle: “We do not inherit the Earth from our forefathers, we borrow it from our children.”