EDITORIAL

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WASTE management is a challenge to many local government units, and it is confounding how a promising law that aims to better deal with an environmental issue has been reduced to a toothless legislation. And years since the Ecological Solid Waste Management Act was approved, the country has yet to figure out the best strategy to regulate waste.

News reports and sound bites from the authorities have pointed to the factors in many local governments’ noncompliance with the law: from budgetary and logistical constraints to nonparticipation of constituents, from lack of political will to insufficient knowledge on the relevance of waste management, including garbage segregation.

Mostly it is an enforcement problem. The law clearly states the waste management measures that local governments must follow, the authorized bodies that must enforce them and the corresponding sanctions for noncompliance. But evidently, the consequences are not, to say the least, motivating enough. And the authorities are too forgiving or too slow in holding anyone responsible for violation of the law.

On Dec. 8 the Provincial Environment and Natural Resources Office of Iloilo will hold its 1st Solid Waste Summit, which aims to guide local governments in complying with the Solid Waste Management law. One of the interesting events all sectors must look forward to is the discussion on the establishment of an “Eco SWM Center” as an alternative to sanitary landfill.

There is so much work to do. That this province-wide meeting on solid waste management is being held for the first time speaks of the fact that enforcement had been a drag over the past years: one step forward, two steps back. And the increase in wastes as an effect of development — this clichĂ© truth — remains unstoppable.
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