The world’s trash could be PH’s cash
THE Philippines has again become an unwitting dumping ground for some other country’s unwanted garbage, as tons of plastic trash from South Korea have apparently been abandoned at a port in Mindanao, according to news reports over the weekend.
The shipment of about 5,100 metric tons of discarded plastic arrived at the Mindanao Container Terminal in Tagoloan, Misamis Oriental on July 21, but was classified as “plastic synthetic flakes.”
Bureau of Customs inspectors discovered the discrepancy and impounded the shipment, but it was not until October 25 that the local BoC office in Cagayan de Oro issued a “request of alert order” to have a violation lodged against the shipment’s consignee, a certain Verde Soko II Industrial Corporation located in the Phividec Economic Zone in Misamis Oriental.
In early August, both Verde Soko and the Phividec management claimed that the shipment was legitimate and was covered by the necessary environmental clearances, according to a Philippine News Agency report at the time. The plastic waste was to be reprocessed at the Verde Soko facility into pellets and briquets, which are used as raw materials for new plastic products. However, neither Verde Soko nor Phividec, then or now, has offered any explanation for why the shipment was misdeclared for customs.
It doesn’t take a great leap of imagination to understand why the consignee tried to sneak the shipment into the country, and then hastily abandoned it when its initial explanation for its purpose was not accepted.
Back in July 2017, China announced that it would impose a ban on some two dozen types of waste imports beginning in January 2018, including recyclable plastic. As a consequence, the bottom completely fell out of the waste plastic commodity market. Many countries were left scrambling to figure out what to do with waste plastic that they suddenly couldn’t get rid of at any price.
Commodity prices for even the semi-processed material produced by companies like Verde Soko also bottomed out, because even though that material is not covered by the Chinese ban, the Chinese manufacturers who had been the biggest customers for the stuff already have more supply than they will need for years.
The situation has become a more than minor crisis in some developed countries with organized materials recycling programs. In the US, for instance, municipal governments were earning anywhere from $16 to $25 per ton for plastic waste before the Chinese ban. Many are being forced to consider cutting recycling programs since then because waste management companies are now charging them up to $120 per ton to haul away the waste plastic.
Some other countries have caught on to the implications of the Chinese ban faster than the Philippine government has, and taken steps to impose similar bans to prevent precisely the sort of problem that is now piled up in a port in Mindanao. Malaysia, for example, recently announced it will phase out plastic imports over the next three years.
The shipment stranded in Mindanao highlights some serious chronic shortcomings in the competence and efficiency of the BoC, and in the government’s ability at higher levels to compel other countries to respect the country’s sovereignty enough to not treat it as a garbage dump. Two successive administrations have only been able to make flaccid efforts to get Canada to take back thousands of tons of its trash which arrived in 2013, of which half is now in a landfill in Tarlac, and the rest still festering in a container yard in Manila.
Little wonder that others have also tried ditching their refuse here; besides the shipment in Mindanao, another 5,000 metric tons of garbage from Korea landed in Mandaue, Cebu last year, and is still there. The BoC’s weak claim that they are accomplishing something by detecting and seizing misdeclared trash is meaningless; whether it ends up in a landfill, at the bottom of the sea, or stuffed away in some containers in a corner of a Philippine freight yard makes no real difference – it’s here, and not in its country of origin, and that is the whole point as far as its rightful owners are concerned.
If this country had any imagination, however, it might view the unwanted plastic trash as an opportunity. If the waste is going to end up here anyway, the Philippines could become a significant plastics manufacturer. There already is a plastics manufacturing industry here, but the availability of almost costless raw materials – much of it domestically produced – should encourage its expansion, and along with that, research and development in reprocessing and remanufacturing recycled plastic, which at the moment can’t keep up with the volume of new plastic that is produced and eventually discarded.
The Duterte administration has, like every administration this country has ever had, made expansion of the industrial base one of its economic aspirations; turning trash into cash by building a plastics recycling industry might be a relatively easy way the government can differentiate itself from its predecessors by producing results instead of rhetoric.
ben.kritz@manilatimes.net
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