Trash talk

A “sickening” form of trash talk this one is.

From June to August 2013, a company named Chronic Inc., based in Ontario, Canada, shipped 50 40-foot container vans to the Manila International Container Port, in six batches. The firm identified the vans’ contents as “scrap plastic materials for recycling.” The consignee of the shipments was Chronic Plastics, reportedly based in Valenzuela City.

But a January 2014 spot check of the vans by the Bureau of Customs (BOC) revealed that they instead contained waste, soiled diapers and household refuse. The deception was clearly in violation of the Basel Convention, an international agreement among 180 countries—including the Philippines and Canada—which aims to prevent the dumping of hazardous material by wealthier countries in poorer countries.

The following month, the BOC filed in the Department of Justice a case for violation of the Toxic Substances and Hazardous Wastes Control Act of 1990 and the Basel Convention; it then called on the Department of Environment and Natural Resources for help in sending the garbage shipments back to their point of origin.

Since then, time and again, a coalition of environmental and civic society groups have demanded that Canada take back the tainted material. To this end, Greenpeace Southeast Asia, the EcoWaste Coalition, BAN Toxics, Ang Nars, Mother Earth Foundation, the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, Green Convergence, and Ateneo School of Government filed an online petition through the website Change.org.

More than 11,000 Canadians have signed the Change.org petition asking the Canadian government to “reexport” the container vans back to their country. A Winnipeg resident said: “I can’t even comprehend the reasons why these containers would ship to the Philippines. How horrible for the Philippines!” An Ontario woman posted: “As a Canadian, I’m insulted.” More and more people around the world have added their names to the petition.

But believe it or not, more than 400 days after the first of these container vans arrived, they remain unclaimed and are now even causing more problems at the crammed container terminal.

The Philippine government did not help things when the BOC, DENR, and the Department of Foreign Affairs crafted a plan to “permanently dispose of them in Philippine soil” by dumping them in a sanitary landfill in Tarlac, Greenpeace’s Abigail Aguilar rued. This, after an earlier plan to ship 16 of the container vans to the Subic International Container Terminal Services port, in an attempt to decongest the Manila port, failed when Subic sent the vans back to Manila because, according to Aguilar, there were “big holes in the vans leaking and emitting a foul odor.”

The misguided plan to “bury” the illegal cargoes would set a “wrong precedent,” says EcoWaste president Von Hernandez. “This government proposal sends a signal to unscrupulous and illegal waste traders to ship their unwanted junk to the Philippines. There can be no compromises here. This garbage shipment must be sent back to Canada, its country of origin.”

The plan also misses the point. It is not the Philippines’ responsibility to figure out a solution to this leaking, harmful situation. It is for the Canadian government to take back what is rightfully theirs—even if they don’t want it. Instead it does nothing, except by merely saying it is looking into the matter and hopes to resolve it immediately.

The longer it takes the Canadian and Philippine governments to fix this mess, the more the 50 container vans become a horrible environmental hazard to the people of the Philippines.

The Philippine government should listen to its people’s calls and continue to apply pressure on the Canadian government to do just that. “This is not just a matter of the hazardous waste dumped here, this involves our dignity as a country,” said Ang Nars party-list Rep. Leah Paquiz. The Philippines shouldn’t be a dumping ground for other people’s trash nor should we be the ones getting rid of it for them.

How long must we wait before Canada, known as one of the world’s most environment-friendly countries, brings back its shipments of hazardous filth home?