Will Cebu City establish a landfill?

Bayawan City, in the province of Negros Oriental, is a medium-sized city with a population of a little more than 125,000 which is 12.5% compared to Cebu City’s one million residents. In land area though, Bayawan City is made of approximately 70,000 hectares which is more than twice bigger than Cebu City’s 33,000 hectares. It is fairly a new city because it was chartered only a quarter of a century ago on December 23, 2000 thru Republic Act 8983 sponsored by Congressman Herminio G. Teves. In comparison, Cebu City, is some six decades older having been chartered on February 24, 1937 thru Commonwealth Act 58, authored by Congressman Vicente Rama.

Shortly after its charter, this Negros Oriental city under the leadership of Mayor German Sarania and Vice Mayor Rene Gaudiel transformed from a sleepy municipality into a dynamic city that has become known, in an Eclar award, as the Cleanest City in the Philippines. Honestly though, I do not know what is this award that reportedly benchmarked Bayawan’s best practices in solid waste management, agriculture, and sustainable governance.

Let us dig into a not-so-distant past. Cebu City passed many ordinances on garbage collection which for purposes of updating were incorporated in a code form in 1988 while Bayawan City only passed a handful of waste disposal ordinances reckoned as of 1988. While the numerical disparity of passed pieces of local legislation was given, it should be worth noting that Bayawan City’s Ordinance No. 5, Series of 1961, was already code in form with over a hundred sections. In any case, as of that time, the only practice of garbage disposal was to dump all debris into the now-defunct open dumpsites in Barangay Inayawan, Cebu City, and in Sitio Buli-Buli, in the municipality of Tolong, the former name of Bayawan. By the way, there was this idea of former mayor Ronald Duterte to establish a landfill to replace the Inayawan dump site. That idea was aborted, then shelved and eventually forgotten.

Forward to a few years. In the early 2000’s, while Cebu City continued to dump garbage in Inayawan, the visionary attorneys Sarania-Gaudiel leadership tandem acquired a 27-hectare private land in Sitio Omod, Barangay Maninihon, 10 kilometers uphill from Bayawan’s central business district. The purpose of the acquisition was to establish a sanitary landfill projected to last 20 to 30 years. The site was carefully selected and clay-lined to prevent leachate contamination of the groundwater. Today, it is known as the economically self-sustaining city’s Waste Management and Ecology Center, which no longer depends upon the city’s budget to run and operate. Not only has it become a must-see tourist destination, is received the award as the Best Solid Waste Disposal Facility by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources.

Cebu City, which generates some 700 tons of garbage daily does not have any landfill of its own! For unknown reasons, it has not allocated a part of its billion-pesos revenue to establish and operate the kind of facility Bayawan has. The Sarania-Gaudiel idea is not a vision of our local officials. For a long while, we threw our rubbish in a privately-maintained landfill spending a staggering sum of money in the process.

I like to view the disaster in the Binaliw landfill where lives were lost in a rather non-conventional perspective. Had our leaders heeded the vision of Mayor Ronald Duterte (and that of Sarania and Gaudiel) to build for the city a new landfill, the Binaliw tragedy would not have happened. Differently asked: “Should not our leaders take it as a fresh eye opener on the need to establish a sanitary landfill.”