A congresswoman from Mindanao has refiled her bill that bans both the import and export of waste of whatever kind and hopes that President Rodrigo Duterte will be like-minded and certify the bill as urgent.
“I will also file other bills on plastic waste, waste redemption, waste recovery, and the proper management of our water and aquatic resources. This is an all-out war on waste because we want our country to be beautiful and prosperous,” Misamis Oriental Rep. Juliet T. Uy said.
Uy requested the leaders of the House of Representatives to ask the President to certify the bill as urgent.
However, the committees in the House have yet to be filled while the panel that will tackle the bill has not been constituted.
In a statement, Uy also asked the Bureau of Customs anew to make sure imported garbage does not arrive at any of the country’s international seaports aside from the Port of Tagoloan.
The Customs bureau’s mandate is to inspect cargo that arrive at the ports and not to monitor what cargoes are being sent from abroad since the government stopped its arrangement with Societe General du Survillance many years ago.
Uy’s bill tasks the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, Department of Finance and the Department of Transportation to jointly establish an Environmental Protection Desk at every port of entry to be manned rounds the clock by trained personnel to stop the movement of garbage in the air and sea ports.
“Imported cargoes declared as waste or misdeclared to conceal the true waste cargo or smuggled into the country shall not be offloaded from any transport vessel and shall be immediately ordered by port authorities to depart from the port and return the illegal cargo to its port of origin, with all costs borne by the shipper,” the bill said.
She said the bill draws lessons learned from the House investigation on the Verde Soko imported garbage sent to Misamis Oriental from South Korea.
The bill makes it illegal for any person, groups of persons, business, corporate entity, or government office “to import or export any form and whatever amount of waste, processed waste materials, waste by-products whether organic or inorganic and in whatever form whether solid, liquid, liquefied, gaseous, or mixture of substances.”