RA 9003: Good legislation, bad enforcement

FOR a small country like the Philippines, we have more than enough lawmakers – 24 in the Senate, 316 at the House of Representatives, 1,265 scattered in 81 provinces and over three million city and municipal councilors.

For one, lawmakers play crucial roles in crafting, updating, superseding, debunking or amending laws to cope with the changing times, or if the situation calls for it. The laws they enact somehow harmonize the way we live, we act and interact.

To some, it’s a social bible.

In the Philippines however, there seemed to be a problem on the enforcement aspect. Take the case of Republic Act 9003, otherwise known as the Ecological Solid Waste Management Act of 2001.

Mid last year, the Commission on Audit (COA) came out with a report on the status of sanitary landfills in the country. According to COA, operational sanitary landfills are fast filling up and the government can’t seem to cope with the rapidly increasing volume of garbage.

In its report, COA said that the 245 operational landfills are servicing less than 30 percent of the local government units, including the cities of Metro Manila which generate no less than 800-truckloads of solid waste daily.

In trying to address the concern, the Department of Environment and Natural Resources cited the need for the LGUs to construct additional 300 garbage repositories. However, not all localities can afford the humongous cost of constructing one even after the enactment of the Local Government Code which devolved national government functions directly affecting the localities.

Interestingly, solid waste management should not be construed as a collect, dump and fill system. RA 9003 has many other salient provisions primarily designed to veer away from the destructive way of garbage disposal – one of which embarks on three Rs.

It actually stands for Reduce, Reuse and Recycle.

Reduce means to cut back on the amount of trash we generate. Reuse means to find new ways to use things that otherwise would have been thrown out. Recycling means to turn something old and useless (like plastic milk jugs) into something new and useful (like picnic benches, playground equipment and recycling bins).

Under these circumstances, many are inclined to believe that RA 9003 would be another dismal failure unless the DENR checks at the unmitigated production and generation of waste, particularly plastic, and exacerbated by poor segregation resulting in landfills filling up with mixed waste at a faster rate.

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