by Howie G. Severino

IN THE PUNGENT course of doing a documentary on garbage, cameraman Egay Navarro and I followed our household trash home -- or at least to what we thought was its final destination. Mine ended up in the vast San Mateo landfill, the object of civil disobedience campaigns by angry residents of Antipolo. Egay's trash went to Payatas, after a winding route in an open dump truck through the narrow streets of Cubao and New Manila. This was about one year before the tragedy in Payatas, where more than 220 people got buried under an avalanche of garbage, including perhaps the refuse from Egay's home and those of millions of others in Metro Manila. Nearly all the attempts at accountability after this man-made disaster pointed to government officials, who were doubtlessly remiss in dealing with the biggest open dumpsite in the country. But the complicity of ordinary people, garbage producers all, has hardly been discussed.

By themselves, the Payatas dump site and the San Mateo "sanitary" landfill represent the range of obvious options facing policy makers wrestling with 7,000 tons of trash produced daily by over 11 million residents of Metro Manila. Neither option is promising, to say the least.

Payatas has no long-term future, and this was even before the tragedy that immediately shortened its life span. Open dumpsites have a habit of becoming symbols for Third World poverty in first world media. The most famous dumpsite of all was Tondo's Smokey Mountain. Perhaps tired of having TV images of the dump aired internationally whenever the Philippines was mentioned, then President Fidel Ramos ordered it leveled and turned into a housing estate.

Due to the sensational nature of the disaster, images of Payatas and the hundreds buried alive may forever be linked to the Estrada administration, even if the President does succeed in having it transformed eventually into a mall or subdivision.

Payatas was supposed to go the way of Smokey Mountain years ago. But bureaucratic foot dragging delayed its demise. Officials could have been tripping over the sacks of money generated by the city's enormously lucrative garbage trucking operations.

Surrounded by bare hills, the uninhabited San Mateo landfill appears more sustainable, except that the route of hundreds of garbage trucks every day passes through Antipolo. Residents there feel aggrieved that the trucks spread foul smells, keep away investors and threaten pedestrians with their speeding drivers. Several times, Antipoleños have resorted to barricading the route with their bodies, backing down when officials make promises made to be broken.

The Metro Manila Development Authority (MMDA) has vowed to close down the landfill by the end of 2000. But no other city or municipality within trucking distance of the metropolis is keen to host the next landfill for the urban masses. Local officials fear the health and environmental issues related to leaching plus the consequences for a community's image of being the dumping ground of Metro Manila.

IN OUR CROWDED archipelago, the competition for space has become increasingly intense. Allocating land just for garbage seems an awful waste and extremely inefficient. Incineration, the enclosed, high-heat burning adopted in many advanced societies, could have been a more efficient method in terms of space. But that option was canceled out by the Clean Air Act, after focused lobbying by environmental activists concerned about incineration's hazardous emissions.

With options for centralized waste disposal running out, it has become fairly clear that only decentralized approaches are becoming feasible—barangay or municipal collection and recycling schemes, community composting, and the like. These would need to be combined with public drives, even government incentives, to buy and use less packaged consumer items. This effort would have to be effective enough to counter the overwhelming influence of advertising.

But there is little potential profit and graft in such approaches. What then is to greatly motivate public officials to change course?

Even if they were persuaded, it wouldn't be easy. It would require community meetings and systems management, even door-to-door campaigning to influence individual behavior. This kind of effort in any community could easily be on the scale of, well, an election campaign. Then again, someone capable of the logistics and management challenge of a well-oiled electoral campaign should be able to run a grassroots garbage reform drive. As in any election, the battleground for this type of campaign is the hearts and minds of millions of individual decision-makers.

It was while following our garbage trail that Egay and I realized the problem of trash was just as much at its source as it was in its final dumping ground. For every so-called "consumer" after all, there is an individual producer of trash. Whatever goes into a household will eventually come out in one form or another.

The process that leads to such visions of hell as Payatas usually starts in clean, orderly homes.

Like most household trash producers we interviewed, we had no idea where our garbage ended up after it was picked up by the basureros. Our simple observation that most people had an "out of sight, out of mind" attitude about their garbage applied to us as well. Even after the horrific TV images in Payatas were beamed into millions of households, chances are nobody recognized their former property in the piles of wet smoky garbage being bulldozed in the search for more corpses.

Unlike other issues Egay and I had tackled in the past, such as logging, mining, and blast fishing, the garbage crisis was something the both of us had contributed to directly. This was personal. And we were little different from anybody else, except that for the sake of our documentary, we followed our garbage home.