ILOILO CITY — Local government officials have been visiting institutional waste generators like malls, factories and warehouses in the city to inform them that only segregated waste will be collected and only residuals will be accepted at the sanitary landfill.
The visits and information sharing are being done to address the garbage problems, which is one of the causes of flooding in the city, said the city hall’s General Services Offices (GSO) head Joren Sartorio in an interview on Tuesday.
Residual waste materials are those left after the biodegradable wastes and recyclables have been set apart.
After the visit to institutional waste generators, Sartorio said they will be going down to the barangay level. It is very timely that the Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG) has issued a memorandum circular calling on barangays to activate their solid waste management council.
Another GSO team is also trying to work out an agreement between barangays and junk shop operators so the former could send their recyclables to the shops to reduce the volume of wastes that will be sent to the landfill.
However, he emphasized that at present the “no segregation, no collection policy” only affects institutional waste generators.
At the household level, they are to conduct a waste analysis and characterization survey on the third or fourth week of this month to determine the present waste generation of barangays.
He added that they are still in the process of procuring materials needed for the survey. “It will be a random sampling because it is important that we get the waste generation of barangays,” he said.
The GSO has tapped the support of the University of the Philippines and the Department of Environment and Natural Resourced- Environmental Management Bureau in coming up with the survey design.
To complement the effort, Sartorio said that his office has requested the DILG to include the GSO as among their resource offices for the orientation of newly-elected barangay officials.
“We wanted to emphasize the need for waste segregation. We need the cooperation of barangay official to implement this segregation at source” he said.
At present, Iloilo City generates 300 tons of trash a day; 50 percent are biodegradable, 25 percent are recyclables and the remaining 25 percent are residuals.
The residuals are the ones that will be brought to the sanitary landfill in Barangay Calajunan, in Mandurriao district. (Perla Lena/PNA)
