TWO Quezon City councilors are demanding the immediate closure of the Payatas dump to avoid a repeat of a trash slide that killed 300 people in July 2000.
Councilors Ranulfo Ludovica and Victor Ferrer are urging Mayor Herbert Bautista, Environment Secretary Ramon Paje and Metropolitan Manila Development Authority Chairman Francis Tolentino to look for alternative dump and close down the Payatas landfill soon.
“It’s long overdue,” Ludovica told The Standard.
“There have been so many extensions given to the city to allow the facility’s operation beyond December 2013.”
The city government could tap the Rodriguez sanitary landfill or Pier 13 in Tondo, Manila as an alternative waste disposal facility, he said.
Another viable option is to build a waste-to-energy facility in Payatas, he added.
Quezon City generates at least 1,979 metric tons of trash a day.
In 2013, business tycoon Manny V. Pangilinan proposed to put up such facility after a three- year study.
In a two-page proposed resolution, Ludovica and Ferrer have raised fears for the lives of thousands of residents.
Tons and tons of garbage have been “creeping toward the houses in the vicinity because whenever garbage is dumped, the trash is just being bulldozed to flatten the surface area for the next dump truck,” it read.
“Worse, the garbage pile covers and clogs half of a creek running across the barangay, thereby posing a threat for health and environmental hazards, possible displacement of the residents and recurrence of trash avalanche.”
Residents near the transfer station and the dump have been complaining that some laws, and evironmental rules and regulations have been violated by the operators and haulers as well.
According to Ludovica, the leachates from the piles and piles of trash at the Payatas landfill could contaminate the source of water at La Mesa dam that supplies 97 percent of Metro Manila’s safe and potable water.
Even the Marikina River is at risk of water pollution, he said.
“Whereas, despite the apparent danger to the public, the private contractor and some city officials in charge in the management, maintenance and operation of the garbage dump as well as the collection of trash remain unmindful of the welfare of the people. Hence, the need to shut down the same in compliance with the provisions of Republic Act No. 7160, otherwise known as the Ecological Solid Waste Management of 2000,” the March 25 proposed measure read.