MANILA – Overwhelmed with discarded face masks, plastic bottles and other garbage during the COVID-19 crisis, a small riverside community in Manila has set up its own waste management service, giving its workers, especially women, an opportunity to improve their livelihoods.
The Tagumpay 83Zero Waste Association’s network of street sweepers, drivers and river guards clean sewage and collect recyclable waste from 5,700 community residents and 24 nearby villages and five schools.
They also have a junk shop where they earn money by selling collected waste, such as used plastic bottles and hard plastics, to recycling centers.
“Apart from reducing plastic waste in our community, we also help our members earn more for their families,” said Catherine Gabriel, president of the Garbage Workers Association in Barangay 830, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
The organization is one of two community groups in Manila selected by the United Nations Human Settlements Program, or UN-Habitat, to receive training on waste management and funding to expand their operations.
Many communities struggle to collect and recycle waste in a country that uses insufficient resources to deal with the mountain of waste it produces every year.
The Philippines is among the top waste generators in Southeast Asia, with 18.05 million tons of waste in 2020 expected to reach 23.61 million tons in 2025, according to the National Solid Waste Management Commission.
Local authorities in the villages and surrounding areas are tasked with waste removal but often lack the funds, skilled workers and infrastructure to support such operations.
Civil society organizations often fill vacancies, but their workers receive low wages and lack job security.
The Barangay 830 garbage organization started without funding but has received millions of pesos from non-governmental organizations, as well as UN-Habitat, to purchase equipment and use facilities.
“If we only rely on the association’s money, we will not be able to buy trucks to carry goods or build an office that will sustain our program,” said Gabriel.
The Philippines is marking Zero Waste Month this January to promote sustainable production and consumption practices, as part of its effort to keep industrial and consumer packaging waste out of the environment by 2030.
The campaign’s government poster touts its theme of “integrating sustainability and circularity into the illegal waste sector.”
It is not clear, however, whether illegal waste workers, the backbone of the country’s recycling efforts, will be part of the change.
SPACES OF MEDICAL ADMINISTRATION
The Philippines needs 42,000 barangays and villages to establish their own collection point and door-to-door segregated waste collection.
But only 39% of villages have such facilities, according to the Audit Commission.
The task of local waste management is usually given to more than 100,000 waste disposal workers in the country. Some of them earn less than one dollar a day.
The Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources said it wants to do more to protect the rights of waste collectors and “turn waste collection and planning into legal activities and institutions.”
In Dumaguete, a city on the island of Negros in the southern Philippines, Aloja Santos and other waste pickers were trained in 2018 by the Mother Earth Foundation, an NGO that works to reduce waste and pollution.
The idea was that after a year of NGO support, the local administration would implement these practices.
But the barangay could not cover our expenses. So we provide our backpacks, gloves, boots and other items. “We only use bicycles to collect heavy waste from houses,” said Santos.
Santos and other women waste workers form a group that serves 400 families a day to collect and sort biodegradable waste and plastic, often without adequate personal protective equipment.
The group charges each household 50 pesos, or less than a dollar, per month.
Because its operation is independent of local authorities, workers must pay the government 3 pesos for each bag of waste. Philippine law prohibits the “unauthorized removal of recyclables” intended for official collection.
“We are part of the solution to reducing plastic waste in landfills, but we want fair compensation. We do the dirty work for the producers, and we want to be part of the discussion on how to better manage our waste,” said Santos, who is a labor rights lawyer.
He said illegal waste workers are not included in the discussions about the Philippines’ extended producer responsibility (EPR) laws. The government passed a law in 2022 that obliges manufacturers of plastic packaging and products to be financially responsible for the collection and recycling of their products.
“For example, we don’t know the actual amount of collected waste that is sold to the plastic credit markets,” he said.
EMPLOYEE RIGHTS
Busy informal waste workers provide an affordable solution to Philippine communities struggling with waste segregation, research shows.
But they are exposed to health and safety risks.
In February, a coalition of 12 waste workers’ unions representing more than 1,000 members formed a nationwide coalition to enforce legal protections.
The Philippine National Waste Workers Alliance, led by Santos, is calling for workers’ protection such as accident compensation, health insurance and occupational safety and training and participation in policy making.
Last April, the senator introduced the Magna Carta for Waste Workers bill, which contains the demands of waste workers.
Environmentalists want a global agreement to reduce plastic and call for illegal workers to be included in the framework. But a UN-backed effort to forge such a deal late last year failed.
The delay in drafting the agreement means that waste workers are still unprotected, working in dangerous conditions and exposed to toxic fumes from burning plastics, said Marian Ledesma, waste campaigner for Greenpeace Southeast Asia.
“Trash workers are often discriminated against and abandoned by society,” said Ledesma.
“We have to make sure that … they have a say in planning and implementation, and they have access to decent work opportunities as we end the age of plastic.” – Thomson Reuters Foundation
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