Wasting time instead of managing waste
Credit to Author: BEN KRITZ, TMT| Date: Wed, 29 May 2019 16:18:29 +0000
THE Department of Interior and Local Government (DILG) is a study in contradictions. It is one of the larger departments of the government and has vast authority over things that affect the everyday lives of ordinary people, yet receives almost no media attention and is little understood by the public. It is also a contradiction in the way it manages its various responsibilities, carrying out mandates that ought to be organized at a provincial or regional level by micromanaging them at the smallest possible level of government.
Perhaps the most glaring example of this is its approach to waste management, which in recent months has been the source of much bitter criticism from local officials around the country. Needless to say, the program aggressively pushed by the DILG has been a comprehensive failure, and has probably created more problems than it solves.
Back in July 2018, following the barangay elections held throughout the country, the DILG attempted to breathe new life into the Barangay Ecological Solid Waste Management Committees, a dubiously overwrought creation of the Ecological and Solid Waste Management Act of 2000 (RA 9003). In a six-page memorandum circular, the DILG “reminded” incoming barangay officials of their responsibility to “organize or reorganize” the committees within their respective jurisdictions, outlined the composition and duties of the committees, and spelling out the penalties for non-compliance with the edict.
Having done that, the DILG also reminded municipal, city, and provincial governments to update and submit their 10-year Solid Waste Management Plans to the National Solid Waste Management Commission. The implication, of course, was that with the micro-level barangay committees in place such plans should be an easy matter, since waste management would be largely handled at the source.
Not surprisingly, things did not quite work out the way the DILG envisioned, except for the part about its imposing penalties for non-compliance, which it began to do in December by preparing charges against barangay leaders who had not gotten their respective solid waste committees off the ground. The DILG followed this up by issuing show cause orders to 108 other local government units around the country for failing to submit their 10-year plans.
The backlash against the DILG from barangay and other local government officials for its heavy-handedness is entirely justified, although to be fair to the DILG, it is itself simply following the law, unrealistic and unrealized as that law’s objectives may be. Although it looked good on paper, the now nearly 20-year-old National Solid Waste Management Framework has most often been honored in the breach; so invisible have been the activities of the National Solid Waste Management Commission, most people in or out of the government are even aware that such a body exists. Nor has it been quietly effective in any way – if it was, the Office of the President probably would not have felt compelled to overstep the Commission and the DILG to take drastic measures to clean up places like Boracay, the Manila bayfront, El Nido, Coron, and Panglao.
The two specific complaints of local government officials reveal the larger flaws in the entire approach to waste management in the Philippines. First, there is a lack of support for the programs that local government units are expected to carry out. The technical and financial capacity of individual barangays varies greatly across the country; some big urban barangays are better organized and managed than the cities where they are located, while sparsely populated rural barangays are operated on a shoestring, barely able to carry out the most basic functions. Second, there is a lack of centralized management; at every level – even at the national level – waste management is handled by an ad hoc body, with the result being that every level operates in a silo. Where areas of responsibility do overlap, the result is usually disruption of both plans.
The sad upshot of all this is that there does not exist, anywhere in the country, a completely integrated waste management framework that addresses waste from its source all the way to its eventual final disposition. The visibly sorry state of the country’s environment ought to be proof enough that the current approach is a complete failure.
There are some steps that can be taken, but whether or not the central government will be willing to relinquish its ineffective grip is another matter. To start with, the DILG should get out of the garbage business entirely. The country is too geographically, economically, and socially varied for solid waste management to be handled at a national level. To the extent that a “national framework” for waste management is necessary, it should fall within the purview of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources with an eye toward maintaining environmental standards.
Second, the idea that waste management can be handled as a “side job” by committees of officials and other stakeholders who have no clear technical or management experience in the discipline needs to be excised from the country’s governance philosophy. The job should be handled by agencies specifically dedicated to the task, and manned by people who actually know what they’re doing.
Finally, along with professionalizing waste management, a significant amount of centralization and hierarchy must be imposed on it. Given the way the country is organized, the most effective approach would be to organize waste management from the top down, starting at the provincial level. A provincial-level waste management framework would primarily concern itself with the final disposition of waste – engineered landfills, large-scale waste-to-energy facilities, and recyclable materials processing or export facilities. Municipal- and city-level sanitation departments would be responsible for collecting and consolidating wastes and delivering them to the appropriate facilities. Barangay-level efforts to collect and segregate waste along the lines dictated – but not supported – by the current framework can also be overseen by the city or municipality.
ben.kritz@manilatimes.net
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