By VG Cabuag & Jonathan Mayuga
LIKE bees to honey, people holding plastic bags on one or both hands troop to a truck painted yellow-orange but smeared with rust and dirt. Throwing garbage has become a habit for people living on this dead-end street in Barangay Bagbag, Novaliches, Quezon City.
Indeed, throwing and collecting waste is a system that is currently under scrutiny. The scrutiny came with the onset of rain and of the reality there are Filipinos who throw waste with insouciance: anywhere and everywhere.
And, instead of dump trucks, rivers, seas and oceans are the collectors.
The presence of waste from countries like Canada, Korea and the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong in recent days have also added pressure to the country’s waste management system.
The pressure point was revealed during the attempt to clean up a portion of the Manila Bay: human waste is endangering the archipelago’s waters.
Blue Economy
AT a forum on minimizing marine plastics organized by the University of the Philippines National Engineering Center (UP NEC), Gerardo F. Parco underscored the importance of sustainably managing the so-called Blue Economy.
With a Blue Economy portfolio of $4 billion and as part of the effort to fight poverty, the World Bank is supporting the sustainable development of the ocean or sea-based economy with concrete actions to address ocean health, according to Parco, senior environmental engineer at the World Bank. A big portion of the WB portfolio on the Blue Economy is about marine plastics, he said at the forum dubbed “ConNECt: Doing our Part” held at the UP-NEC building in Diliman, Quezon City, on June 7.
“In the Philippines, as much as 40 percent of the proteins of the Filipino come from fish, so the ‘Blue Economy’ is very important in terms of the economy in general but in society [in particular] as source of nutrition because it is a big percentage of protein,” Parco said at the forum.
Elsewhere in the world, the Blue Economy—or anything that has something to do with the ocean—is as important, as they contribute to growth and development.
“Around 3 percent to 5 percent of the global GDP [gross domestic product] is derived from the Blue Economy,” he said.
Essentially, the Blue Economy approach to reducing poverty involves addressing marine or ocean plastic pollution as it involves the sustainable use of ocean resources for economic growth, improved livelihoods and jobs, and ocean ecosystem health—all under threat from plastic waste that found its way to the ocean.
ConNECt, which aims to showcase scientific projects, research works and accomplishments in the field of engineering—in this case, on marine plastics—also aims to raise awareness on the value of engineering and science and their critical roles in improving the quality of life of ordinary people.
Under the sea
CITING various sources, Parco said the world uses 300 million tons of plastic a year and that 8 million metric tons of plastic winds up in the oceans each year.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch alone, he said, is now three times the size of France with nearly 2 trillion pieces of plastic. It is located between Hawaii and California.
Even beaches in the farthest area are besieged by plastics, making its proliferation in the ocean a global concern.
“Under a business-as-usual scenario, there will be more plastics than fish in the ocean by 2050,” Parco warned.
He said the Philippines ranked third among 20 countries in terms of mass of mismanaged plastic waste in 2010, with 1.88 million metric tons/year. It was next to China with 8.82 million metric tons per year and Indonesia with 3.32 million metric tons per year.
By 2025, this mass of mismanaged plastic waste will increase further, he added, citing the report “Plastic waste inputs from land into the ocean” by Jenna Jambeck of the University of Georgia. The Philippines will still rank third at 5.1 million metric tons per year, while China and Indonesia’s contribution will grow to 17.8 million metric tons per year and 7.42 million metric tons per year, respectively.
“We don’t import much plastic but we emit a lot of plastic in the ocean. This is a problem,” he said. “We are not a big economy but, based on studies, the plastic we dispose of compared to our imports is proportionately large.”
Parco said this is alarming, considering that the Philippines is at the epicenter of Earth’s marine biodiversity.
Slipping to oceans
OCEAN plastic leakage is attributed to poor solid waste management, according to Parco.
Of the total 2.7 million tons a year of plastic waste, about 84 percent or 2.27 million tons are collected. About 16 percent or 432,000 tons are uncollected.
Of the tons of uncollected plastic waste, 31 percent or 135,000 tons (about 26 percent) are leaked to the ocean.
Meanwhile, of the million tons of waste collected, 17 percent or 386,000 tons are leaked to the ocean.
This is because private hauler companies unload trucks en route to disposal sites in order to cut costs, mostly to poorly located dumps.
“This means that even if waste [is] properly collected, some of [these are] still leaked to the ocean. This means we are all contributing to ocean plastic pollution,” Parco explained.
“Many open dumps are located adjacent to waterways. Are they properly covered? No. In the event of a typhoon, a lot of it is washed away into the nearest water body like Manila Bay,” he added.
Meanwhile, tons of uncollected waste are leaked to the ocean because of limited or zero collection at informal settlements that prompt residents to deposit waste at informal sites.
This is aggravated by small litter and waste that find their way into canals or creeks that eventually flow directly into waterways.
Ingested microplastics
PARCO noted that plastic is causing deaths of marine wildlife that ingest it, like whales and marine turtles.
Despite efforts to remove plastics, such as annual coastal cleanups, a huge volume of plastic waste stays in the ocean.
“This is because 80 percent to 90 percent of plastics do not float. They stay underwater,” Parco said.
A more disturbing report is the fact that plastics are nonbiodegradable.
In time, plastics break down and become smaller and smaller, until they become invisible to the naked eye and become microplastic, which are consumed by fish that is part of the human diet.
Adelina C. Santos-Borja, Resource Management and Development Department head of the Laguna Lake Development Authority (LLDA), said that even freshwater environment is adversely affected by plastic pollution.
Microplastics, which easily pass through water filtration systems, end up in the ocean and lakes, posing a potential threat to aquatic life, according to Santos-Borja.
Citing a five-year trash audit conducted by Mother Earth Foundation, Parco revealed that in the Philippines, 163 million plastic sachets, 48 million plastic bags and about 3 million baby diapers are used and disposed of every day.
More than half (54 percent) of these are branded plastic waste, of which 60 percent can be traced to only 10 major manufacturing companies.
Near manufacturers
ACCORDING to Santos-Borja, “floating plastic waste is often mistaken for food by marine animals and, once ingested, these animals will die slowly of starvation as their stomachs are filled with plastic debris.”
As much as possible, proper solid waste management, reducing waste that includes plastics by recycling or repurposing will help address the problem, she said.
Maria Antonia N. Tanchuling of the UP Institute of Civil Engineering in Diliman observed that plastics comprise 25 percent to 50 percent of trash, based on waste analysis and a characterization study they conducted of the samples they collected from river mouths.
“The most dominant were polymer-shape fragments, originating from bigger plastic materials,” she said, which means that the plastics were there for a very long time that they became smaller and smaller.
Tanchuling, who presented a recent study on microplastics in Metro Manila’s rivers, said there were also pellets found in areas where plastic manufacturers operate. Such is the first real evidence that manufacturing companies are also guilty of direct discharge of plastic waste into Metro Manila rivers, notably, in Valenzuela City, the so-called Plastic City.
Environmental costs
ACCORDING to Parco, the cost of ocean plastics to the tourism, fishing and shipping industries in the Asia-Pacific alone was $1.3 billion in 2008; while damage to marine ecosystems is estimated to be at least $13 billion per year.
“As the Philippines has one of the longest coastlines in the world, managing plastic waste is somehow a problem,” he said.
According to Parco, addressing ocean plastic pollution, even plastic pollution alone, has an accompanying price tag.
For instance, he said, the use of sachets is common among poor consumers.
“If you ban sachets, the first to be affected are the poor. So you don’t just come up with a policy banning plastic because it affects the poor,” Parco said.
However, using an alternative to plastics, like cardboard or paper, also has its disadvantages, he said.
Cardboards and papers easily fill up landfills. The environmental cost of producing paper or cardboard is also a disadvantage, Parco noted, adding that using glass also entails additional cost in terms of energy use.
All in all, the environmental cost of plastic in the consumer goods sector under a business-as-usual scenario is estimated at $139 billion. An alternative to plastic will entail a much bigger cost at $533 billion.
“Other packaging materials will entail 80 percent more energy cost and 130 percent more greenhouse gases.
“Plastics use less energy to manufacture and transport than alternative materials,” he noted.
Moreover, Parco said plastics generate fewer greenhouse-gas emissions and less waste.
Seeking solutions
THERE are, nonetheless, initiatives addressing waste.
For one, Nestlé Philippines became the first manufacturer to implement a residual waste-recovery program in partnership with Valenzuela City, the Department of Education (DepEd) and Green Antz Builders Inc.
Through its “May Balik! Sa Plastik!” campaign, the company focuses on the collection of packaging materials that end up in sanitary engineered landfills or open dumps.
The program targets the recovery of waste laminates such as postconsumer sachets and used beverage cartons. Incidentally, Nestlé Philippines was named by environmental group Greenpeace as the top culprit of ocean pollution as a result of brand audits it conducted in the past two years.
Parco said there are various ways to address plastic pollution, whether inland or in the ocean, beyond the usual coastal clean-ups.
Improving solid waste management—from collection to recycling and proper disposal in sanitary landfills to prevent leaks to the ocean—will help address the problem, he said.
Also, the use of advanced technology and solution to plastic is something to look forward to—like using plastic as construction material for road construction, for instance.
According to Parco, there are many ways to dispose of plastic, particularly single-use plastics that end up as residual waste because they cannot be recycled, like sachets or packaging materials with aluminum foils.
“Use them to make roads. Why not? San Miguel is already doing this,” he said.
Still fragmented
HOWEVER, private-sector efforts on waste management have been fragmented. The latter rests on their notion that it costs more to recycle rather than use new raw materials. Hence, companies create their own standards on how to go about managing what they produce.
For instance, a shopping mall such as SM generates close to 18,000 cubic meters, or about 18 million kilos, of waste every year. And that number is increasing.
According to its sustainability report, SM was able to recycle 88 percent of its waste (about 15.38 million kilos) last year. It is unclear, however, how the mall operator arrived at that figure, only that it “engages their tenants, vendors and customers in recycling activities.”
Property developer and mall operator Ayala Land Inc. (ALI) applied a different tack. ALI established a program to become carbon-neutral in about three years or by 2022. The term “neutral” mainly refers to offsetting what they produce by doing another thing to protect the environment. In this case, ALI will plant trees in certain areas equivalent to every carbon dioxide it releases to the environment.
At the moment, its malls and offices produce about 68,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year. Such figure is expected to grow as the company also plans to double its income and revenue by 2020.
Main pollutant
NEUTRALITY is now becoming a buzzword among companies as they can choose which effort to do to clean up their act rather than focusing on the main problem of waste management.
The companies led by the Po family, the makers of Century Tuna and the owner of the Shakey’s Pizza brand in the Philippines, want to become “plastic-neutral” by 2020.
They recently sealed a deal with Aboitiz-led Republic Cement to coprocess consumer plastic waste, converting these to energy as an alternative fuel in producing cement.
“The amount of plastic that the organization produced will help other companies like Republic utilize [for their manufacturing]. There’s some cost involved because there is collection and that’s what we take care of, the cost of collection,” Shakey’s Pizza Ventures Inc. president Vicente Gregorio said.
“Sometimes it’s not just about lowering the cost. There will be extra costs, but we just have to do our part to go green,” he said.
Packaging, such as plastic bottles and bags, has always been blamed as one of the Earth’s main pollutants.
Investing in recycling
BOTTLING firm Coca-Cola Beverages Philippines Inc., now a unit of Atlanta’s The Coca-Cola Co., will spearhead a P1-billion project to put up a food-grade recycling facility that will transform used PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic bottles into new and recyclable beverage bottles.
These plastic bottles, however, are already being collected by poor communities but shipped out of the country to be processed elsewhere in the world since there’s no local facility to remanufacture these.
Gareth McGeown, president of Coca-Cola Philippines, said the facility will be located outside Metro Manila. It will collect, sort, clean and wash post-consumer plastic bottles and turn these into new bottles that the company itself will use or be sold to other beverage firms, even if these are their competitors.
The company said it plans to use at least half of the recycled content in their packaging by 2030.
McGeown said the facility will have a capacity of 16,000 tons a year and will be the first in Southeast Asia. It will start construction of the facility toward the end of the year and may be operational by 2020.
The total being produced in the country using PET bottles are about 130,000 tons.
McGeown said the local Coke softdrinks maker will only own a portion of the said facility and the rest will be by its local partner and an international technology partner.
Researching alternatives
COKE’S former owner San Miguel Corp., on the other hand, claimed that before sustainability even became a buzzword, its packaging business was already practicing recycling since it uses bottles for its beer business.
“Having swapped plastic bottles for reusable glass and metal, consumers are turning to more sustainable alternatives like biodegradable packaging formats, or visiting refilling stations with used containers rather than buying brand-new products,” San Miguel said, adding that more people are holding manufacturers accountable for managing post-consumer waste.
Even other bottled water companies are slowly placing their produce in bottles as they try to reduce plastic usage.
As many cities in the country are now banning single-use plastic bags—because these clog waterways—manufacturers are producing more waste than ever, such as paper bags and reusable eco-bags made of cloth or any other material other than plastic.
Many consumers are finding the use of paper bags very impractical since they tear easily and cannot be used for wet products.
“The only way to make paper products stronger is to add wax,” D and L Industries Inc. (DNL) president Alvin Lao said. However, Lao said wax is not biodegradable and increases the cost of paper packaging.
RA 9367
BIODEGRADABLE plastic is just as strong as regular plastic bags and also cheaper than paper bags and has less environmental impact because it does not require the cutting of trees, Lao explained.
He claims DNL is “doing a lot of research and development on the use of plastic bags but there has to be a law such as the ‘Bio Fuels Law’ [Republic Act 9367] so that there will be consistencies in the execution.”
Lao said he and other DNL executives are meeting with officials of the Marikina local government to discuss the difference between a regular plastic and biodegradable plastic. The latter uses mainly plant-based material and the biocompostable products, which can decompose under certain conditions. However, many of the LGUs still think that all plastic bags are created equal.
If a regular plastic bag, for instance, takes about 50 years to decompose, the biodegradable ones only take months to become part of the environment, Lao explained.
“People are becoming aware of the issue [on plastic use] but the alternatives are still being discussed until now,” he said. “We are helping them to find the alternatives.”
Lao noted there is no unified rule yet on the use of biodegradable plastics; thus, some LGUs totally ban all plastics while some LGUs allow the use of biodegradable plastic.
“What is needed is a legislative mandate for the uniform use of biodegradable plastics,” Lao said.
Replication efforts
DNL has a starch-based product that can replace plastic, though it costs more. It’s currently being used in mulching films, as well as garbage, compost and shopping bags. New applications include using laminates in the paper industry.
Still unsegregated waste is not that bad.
The Metro Pacific Investment Corp. has proposed to build a P22-billion facility to convert all the Metro Manila waste being dumped in Payatas in Quezon City into energy. The said facility will convert 3,000 metric tons of waste into 36 megawatts, or more than the city’s requirements.
If successful, the company said it will replicate the effort in many local government units around the country that do not have their own proper waste disposal system.
With Jennina Marie Mora, Intern
Image credits: AP/BULLIT MARQUEZ
1 comment
If only Filipinos knows how to throw or use single use plastics and have discipline this can be prevented. If you are living in a nearby beach or seaside you just don’t like the view with lot’s of floating plastics in the sea is so sad to look at.