THE plastics are coming. And they’re coming for you. Initially, they came for the fish and the corals. Today they are slowly taking over coastlines, one plastic straw at a time. Tomorrow they can be in the fish you’re eating, and the worst part is you won’t even know they’re there.
In the latest Ocean Trash Index by Ocean Conservancy, around 4.22 million items were collected during the 2017 International Coastal Cleanup (ICC) in the Philippines, 268,983 of which were straws and stirrers.
Based on a study by Ocean Conservancy and the McKinsey Center for Business and Environment, the Philippines is one of the five countries globally that account for half of the world’s plastic waste. Around half a million metric tons of plastic waste in the country leaks into the ocean every year.
In an interview with the BusinessMirror, SMARTSeas PH Project Management Office Project Manager Vincent V. Hilomen said the Philippines can already overtake China given its size and the amount of plastic pollution it creates. He said that based on 2016 data, the Philippines ranked third—behind China and Indonesia—in plastic pollution.
“If you look at the size of China as well as that of Indonesia, you divide the amount of plastics by the area of the country, or even by the population, we could easily rank number one,” Hilomen said.
Paradise lost
He added that if Filipinos think that the problem is something remote and not yet alarming, they need to think twice. Cities are littered with plastic, especially esteros. Plastic waste is also polluting renowned places in the country. There is no escaping this problem.
Hilomen said in a recent visit to Tubbataha Reef in Palawan, a natural park and World Heritage Site, he and his team observed a lot of plastic waste coming from all over the country.
Plastic bags from various malls nationwide can be found there. It has come to a point where local residents were harvesting the plastics from the sea.
“Tons and tons of plastics are produced because it’s so cheap to produce plastic but plastics hardly decompose. So if you throw one in Manila, they go to the drain, the drain goes to the river, the river goes to the sea, and you’ll end up having plastic in the ocean,” Hilomen said.
“You’d be surprised [that] when we went to Tubbataha, we saw plastic there from all parts of the Philippines. We knew that the plastic came from [a certain place] because they had labels. So garbage from Manila, Iloilo, usually end up elsewhere,” he added.
Problems
Reaching this point when the world’s waters are being threatened by plastic did not happen overnight and was not the result of the actions of any one person or company. It was a product of decades of everyone’s plastic use.
It stems from many things. Hilomen said poor education and the lack of policies that can force sectors to improve the situation have contributed to the problem.
He said there are times families are not that conscious of their consumption of products and the ways by which they dispose of them. This is especially crucial when teaching children since they learn through the examples of adults.
Hilomen added that in some cases, culture comes into play since there are Filipinos who would tend to dismiss the problem and say “harina lang ’yan” when referring to plastic waste.
Further, Hilomen said in many coastal areas in the country, the most common plastic found on the beach are shampoo sachets. This speaks about the Filipino’s tingi (retail) culture that makes it difficult to prevent people from consuming these tiny sachets.
Other problems include poor waste management nationwide. Hilomen said that when it comes to segregation, there are households that carefully segregate their trash into nabubulok, ’di nabubulok (things that biodegrade, those hat don’t biodegrade) and recyclables.
While this is good practice, their efforts are all for naught when garbage collectors come. When they arrive, garbage collectors just dump the household waste together into one heap.
Hilomen also lamented the reactive rather than proactive stance of the government when it comes to creating campaigns against the use of plastics and pollution. He said it could be really easy to come up with campaigns raising greater awareness among Filipinos.
It does not also help that local government units (LGUs) are cash-strapped. Hilomen said that while there is a law on waste segregation, it is difficult to implement because of the lack of financial resources that would allow LGUs to put up their respective solid-waste management plants.
If these issues are not resolved, Hilomen said it will fulfill the “prophecy“ that by 2050, there will be more plastic than fish in the world’s oceans. This is because when fish swallow plastic or are strangled by nylon strings, they can die.
Beware the nanoplastics
Hilomen said that more than these plastic materials that can easily be seen floating on the water, there are microplastics or nanoplastics that have the ability to enter any living cell.
“The scariest part is that plastics do not degrade. They disintegrate with the sun and elements in the environment, including weather. So that if there’s wave action, they will break, they will shatter but they will not be degraded. They can become nanoplastics, microplastics. If they reach nano size, these plastics can just go through any living cell and they can stay there,” Hilomen said.
Hilomen said these nanoplastics can reach humans through biomagnification. This means organisms with nanoplastics can be eaten by bigger organisms, causing these bigger creatures to ingest whatever nanoplastics are in the system of the organism they just ate. The process continues until a person takes a bite off a fish or crustacean with nanoplastics in its system.
United Nations Development Program (UNDP) Philippines Communications Associate Rosana Ombao said this is not only dangerous for people and fish but also for corals. Since corals are the home, breeding ground and source of food for fish, Ombao said this can affect entire ecosystems.
“While nanoplastics have not reached people, you can deduce it because they followed nanoplastics in [a certain] area and the trend is scary because it’s increasing. [If you remember your chemistry] the flow of a gradient is from a region of higher concentration to a region of low [concentration], that’s the natural flow. So if you have a lot of plastic, its flow is toward the organism. Should we wait for that to happen before we act?” Hilomen said.
For an island nation like the Philippines, nanoplastics are a great threat because of the high consumption of seafood in the country.
Based on the adjusted weights for the Consumer Price Index (CPI) 2012 base year, fish has the third largest weight among basic food items. The largest is rice at 9.59 percent followed by meat at 6.25 percent and fish at 5.74 percent.
Unfortunately, many Filipinos living in coastal areas are from low-income households. This makes them susceptible to any problems that may affect fish and fish supply.
“Most Filipinos have seafood in their diet, especially the coastal areas. They are dependent on the sea for their daily food consumption. If the effect of [nanoplastics] will be severe, the poor will suffer the most,” Ombao said.
Circular economy
In order to help address these problems, the United Nations mounted a #Shape2030 campaign to further the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The global campaign has several work streams, one of which is the circular economy.
The UNDP said through the campaign, the UN is “asking organizations to switch to a circular model that will help to reduce waste, recover resources at the end of a product’s life, and channel them back into production, thus significantly reducing pressure on the environment.”
Hilomen said the circular economy is very important to the Philippines and the world right now. In fact, he said, the country should have thought about it as far back as 20 years ago because the current structure of the Philippine economy remains linear.
“[In a] linear [economy], they just use products to produce a new product and whatever the waste are, they throw them away. Part of that packaging right now are plastics,” Hilomen said.
However, a global campaign by an international organization will not be sufficient. Hilomen and Ombao said it has to include all stakeholders, including households, governments and businesses, to put an end to the plastic pandemic.
Hilomen said there should be a change in behavior which needs to start with the family or at the household level; improvement in governance; and participation from the private sector.
“This is not the problem of just one person of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, it’s the problem of the entire country, not only UNDP. UNDP cannot do it alone, the media cannot do it alone, we cannot do it alone. We need to help one another,” Hilomen said.
Hilomen said if good practices such as waste segregation are taught at an early age, before 7 or 8 years of age, these will have a better chance of being adopted by a child. These should go hand in hand with schools teaching students about the perils of using plastic.
He said the government can also create its own campaigns to enjoin households. Together with the media, he said the government can play a 20-second commercial or public-service announcement on fighting plastic pollution during prime-time hours when most families watch television together.
Ombao said the UNDP is encouraging the private sector to participate more in projects that support or help promote the SDGs, including efforts to shift to a circular economy.
“We, in UNDP, are actually pushing for the private sector to finance the SDGs, specifically on the environment, because there are opportunities. They do not even have to change their operations but just the packaging of their products; and include in their mission/vision sustainability efforts within their companies,” Ombao said.
One of the ways by which companies can change is by rethinking the distribution of their products. Hilomen said in coastal areas where shampoo sachets are common plastic waste, the shampoo manufacturers can instead distribute dispensers to be used by sari-sari stores in purchasing their products in tingi fashion.
Hilomen said Filipinos are no strangers to this kind of practice. In many wet markets, cooking oil, salt, kerosene for oil lamps and other similar items can be bought by transferring the product to a reusable container.
Ombao said this is no different from buying taho from a local vendor while growing up. Back then, she said, there were no plastic cups. If one wanted to buy taho, he or she should have his or her own mug or reusable cup.
Hilomen said Filipinos can also start rewarding good practices by companies by only doing business with those that are SDG-compliant. He said it can be easy to boycott companies that still use plastic packaging in their business.
He added that households, the government and companies also need to change their mind-set when it comes to investing in sustainable practices. Whatever funds they spend to become sustainable can be recouped in the long term, especially when it comes to responding to disasters.
“Yes, you can produce plastic cheaper right now but at the end of the day, you know that if people change their minds, if they change their attitude, you will be left behind. [These are solutions] for the long haul,” Ombao said.
The government also needs to improve its data in monitoring the country’s natural resources. Hilomen said there is infrequent data collection when it comes to the composition of garbage that can be collated from annual coastal cleanups. These cleanups are done once a year, making it impossible to perform a trend analysis.
Data limitations
The Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) has admitted that there is a need to improve environment data generation in the country.
Apart from the limited collection and production of data, challenges faced by the Philippine Statistical System (PSS) in generated environment data include limited collection on the inventory of greenhouse-gas emissions from the different sectors; missing, erroneous and conflicting land records in the country; and expensive equipment that can be used to collect data for land cover and land use.
Hilomen added that there is a need to generate researches on plastic materials and what alternatives can be used to create biodegradable materials. Information and finances are also needed to not only conduct these researches but also act on the findings of these studies.
“There is a need to drive for data, we recognize that, too. That’s why we’re trying to see how we can help the country in this regard,” Ombao said.
Promise
Despite the country’s challenges, there is hope. There are many innovations by the private sector. Private companies have introduced alternatives to plastic spoons and forks and even paper plates. There are innovative containers, Hilomen said, that are produced using gelatin, such that after drinking, people can eat the container.
In the Philippines, the government is laying down the foundation that will force companies to think sustainably. This is being done through efforts such as the one being done by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
The SEC has created Sustainability Reporting Guidelines for Publicly Listed Companies. Sustainability reporting is also known as Environmental, Social and Governance reporting, nonfinancial reporting, or triple bottom-line accounting, in accordance with the SDGs.
“The SEC is now requiring businesses, if they want to secure their business permits, [to] have environment-friendly practices and report them,” Ombao said.
She added that the UNDP also encourages businesses to share their efforts and activities that boost the achievement of the SDGs by 2030. The UNDP also has the Transformational Business Report, which includes the environmental efforts of big companies.
In its Philippine Statistical Development Program, the PSA committed to improving data collection for environment statistics, including the development of an Ecological Footprint Report; accounts and valuation of Forest Ecosystem Services in major river basins; and Ecosystem Health Card, among others.
Further, a number of LGUs are now stepping up in terms of their ordinances. A number of cities in Metro Manila, including Makati City and Quezon City, have imposed stringent rules against the use of plastic in their cities.
As a result, many establishments have complied with the ordinance. Makati City’s Plastic Monitoring Task Force (PMTF) conducts regular inspections of retail establishments.
The PMTF inspected 2,269 retail establishments and food outlets in the first six months of the year. Of these, 114 or 5 percent were found to be noncompliant with the code, particularly its provisions mandating the use of environment-friendly materials.
These efforts are just the tip of the iceberg. There are many more that are being done to help the country—and the world—be rid of the plastic pandemic.
Sustainable solutions are coming. And they are coming to end plastics for good.
Image credits: Nonie Reyes