Return to sender

When you read this the basura is supposed to have finally left Subic and is on its way across the Pacific, 69 containers of trash going back home to Canada, after weeks of wrangling and threats, of diplomatic downgrades and a ban on official trips. The basura has been our “guest” for over five years; in fact, some of it has attained permanent residence status, having been buried in a landfill in Tarlac.

I’m just wondering why, in all this hullabaloo and gulo, not much has been said or done about going after the firms that brought in the trash in the first place. It wasn’t the Canadian government that sent the trash here, it was a private company, Chronic Inc. of Toronto, that exported the 103 containers to its consignees in Manila – Chronic Plastic and the ironically-named Live Green Enterprise. It’s mighty strange that the owners and/or managers of these two nondescript companies seem to be getting a free pass, not even being made to pay the costs – reported to be P10 million – of fumigating and shipping back the basura they imported. There were a couple of tweets that they should be hung out to dry or threats to that effect, but until now not even the names of the owners/managers have been disclosed to the public. What gives?

Turns out, importing waste is more common than we think. As shown by other recent exposés on similar importations from South Korea, Hong Kong and Australia, waste is regularly imported – for all kinds of purposes legal and perhaps otherwise, including use as fuel (as in the case of a cement plant) and as raw material for diverse products, including, I was quite shocked to learn, toilet paper.

Despite the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal that took effect in 1992, waste – lots and lots of it – has been crossing boundaries, more so as the throw-away culture took root in the prosperous societies of the West. These countries would ship their trash, in the name of recycling, to developing countries where the waste is sorted and what is recyclable retrieved – certainly a hazardous process that pollutes and corrupts the air, soil, water and environment of the largely poor rural communities that do the sorting. China used to be the biggest recipient of such “recyclable waste” – until 2017, under what it called the National Sword policy, when it said no more. A lot of the trash was then taken by other Asian countries like Indonesia and Malaysia, and it seems some of it found its way to our shores. Malaysia has since announced a policy of not accepting waste shipments and returning these back to sender.

I hope we adopt such a policy too, but, as always, the implementation’s the thing – nothing should make lusot, falsely declared as household goods or other nondescript items. And hopefuly too our return to sender policy will not again take five years.