Plastic waste: A local and global problem

By Marit Stinus-Cabugon

JANUARY is Zero Waste Month. The National Solid Waste Management Commission defines zero waste as an “advocacy that
promotes the designing and managing of products and processes to avoid and eliminate the volume and toxicity of waste and materials.”
To bring zero waste advocacy to a higher level, more than a thousand youth gathered in Dumaguete City to share best practices
from communities that are successfully working towards the zero waste goal. The event, dubbed 2018 Zero Waste Youth Convergence,
was hosted by the Foundation University College of Business Administration. The participants signed a petition addressed to Dumaguete
City Mayor Felipe Remollo urging him to implement a six-year-old city ordinance that bans plastic bags and styrofoam. The full
implementation of the ordinance, passed in August 2011, reportedly got stranded on businesses’ assurances that they were using
biodegradable plastics.
The ordinance was passed to address the clogging of creeks and canals, and to protect the environment and the public’s health.
That was 2011. Fast forward to 2018 and “Dumaguete City is facing a waste crisis,” to quote the Facebook-posted call for the youth to
join the zero-waste event and make a difference. “Our dumpsite is overfilled and waste from the dumpsite falls into the Banica River, our
beaches and parks are strewn with garbage, trash clogs our canals and estuaries, and plastic waste that will remain in the environment
for hundreds of years is spreading in our coastal waters including our marine protected areas.” Famous dive spot Apo Island is just a few
kilometers off the coast of Dumaguete City.
As to the allegedly biodegradable plastics, the European Union Commission in its “A European Strategy for Plastics in Circular
Economy” (January 16, 2018) points out that available biodegradable plastics mostly “degrade under very specific conditions which may
not always be easy to find in the natural environment, and can thus still cause harm to ecosystems.” Moreover, in the Philippine context,
plastic bags labeled biodegradable are actually not biodegradable but so-called oxo-degradable plastics. Such bags are worse than
traditional plastic bags in as much as they deteriorate and disintegrate into tiny pieces (microplastics) that can neither be reused nor
recycled. The EU Commission has “started work with the intention to restrict the use of oxo-plastics in the EU.”
The EU plastics strategy is part of its transition to a “Circular Economy” as it is a response to necessity. Like Dumaguete City,
the EU is facing a waste crisis. Starting this year, China has banned the importation of 24 categories of trash and has set strict standards
for the plastic waste that it will continue to import. In 2015 China imported 49.6 million tons of trash from mostly developed countries,
including the EU, the US, Japan and Australia. The EU generates about 26 million tons of plastic garbage every year of which more than
three million tons would be exported to China. Ships that bring Chinese-made consumer goods to Europe would return empty to China
if not for the trash that China’s recycling sector has been importing (AFP/Yahoo, January 21, 2018).
China’s ban is a wake-up call for developed countries to overhaul their waste management policies in general, and their plastics
policies in particular. Environmental organization GAIA in its “Recycling is Not Enough” report released a week ago, points out that rich
countries recycle “their own high-quality plastic domestically and export low-worth plastics to Asia.” Unfortunately, recycling businesses
that lost their market with China’s ban are now looking to other Asian countries. Rob Cole reports that Taiwan, Malaysia, Vietnam and
Turkey are already importing more waste from Europe since last year while Indonesia and Thailand are ‘new markets’ (www.resource.co,
January 9, 2018).
Another immediate effect of the ban is that more garbage is likely to end up in landfills and incinerators, including waste-to-
energy plants. Fortunately, the EU doesn’t see these as long-term solutions. With its new plastics strategy and in line with the Circular
Economy, the EU Commission is setting 2030 as deadline for all plastic packaging to be reusable or easily recyclable. China’s saying no
to being the receptacle of the world’s trash is the opportunity for the EU to be consistent in its environmental policies. We can’t just use
a lot of plastic, then export it and think that it will disappear, the EU ambassador to the Philippines, Franz Jessen, told the Kapihan sa
Manila Bay last January 24. This year, incidentally, the EU will launch a project in East and Southeast Asia to address these regions’
growing problems with plastic waste and marine litter.
Plastic might be the most significant invention since the invention of the wheel and the number zero. But today it’s choking us
and the world we live in. This is a global problem that we can’t export, burn or dump ourselves out of.