Issues on trash shipments to Philippines

Protestors in Thailand dump plastic waste in front of a government building as they call on Southeast Asian leaders to ban imports of trash from developed countries.

The protest comes ahead of a weekend meeting of the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Countries in ASEAN now receive more than a quarter of global plastic waste, most of which comes from developed economies like Canada, the US, Australia and Japan.  

A party-list calls on the Bureau of Customs to enforce the compulsory pre-shipment inspection of containerized imports to thwart all contraband trying to enter the country, including illegal trash and narcotics.

Pre-shipment inspection is the practice used by governments, mostly in developing countries, of requiring importers to engage accredited third-party surveyors to verify shipment details, such as the price, quantity and quality of goods, before cargoes depart the exporting country.

"The practice compensates for inadequacies in the importing country’s customs and other administrative controls, and discourages the undervaluation of taxable shipments from abroad" Buhay party-list says in a statement as it warned of a likely increase in containerized foreign garbage shipments headed to the Philippines in the months ahead.

"We’ve been targeted as a dumping ground owing to our inadequate controls at various ports of entry," Buhay party-list Rep. Lito Atienza says in a statement.

"North America and Europe are looking for new destinations for their unwanted materials after China banned the importation of used plastics and other recyclables," he adds.

A bill calling for a total ban on the import and export of garbage is filed Monday morning, June 3, at the House of Representatives as the Bureau of Customs in Misamis Oriental held a send-off ceremony for the trash sent to the Philippines from Hong Kong.

The country is "awash with millions of tons of solid wastes, liquefied wastes, and toxic wastes. Our rivers, lakes, seashores, and seas are massively polluted by these wastes. Our cities, factories, and homes produce garbage like there's no tomorrow," Rep. Juliette Uy (Misamis Oriental 2nd District) says in an explanatory note of House Bill 9207.

"We already have a lot of our own garbage. The more garbage we produce, the shorter and more polluted our tomorrows will become. We certainly need not import any more garbage."

LOOK: The 25,610 kilograms of mixed plastic waste shipped from China arrived at the Mindanao Container Terminal in Tagoloan, Misamis Oriental on January 2. EcoWaste Coalition says this is supposed to be a "trial shipment" for another 70 containers. | ???? EcoWaste Coalition pic.twitter.com/v5tHsezLBa

— Philstar.com (@PhilstarNews) May 24, 2019

"As we are all aware by now, at the Port of Tagoloan in Misamis Oriental, there still are over 5,000 tons of garbage yet to be returned to South Korea.  Add to that the so-called municipal waste – processed fuel from Australia and another shipment from Hong Kong."

Last week, the country finally returned misdeclared cargo that turned out to be toxic wastes from Canada that languished in the Philippines for six years. 

Get the latest updates on the controversial shipping of international trash to the Philippines.