Plastics: Convenient, Fashionable and Deadly

Rene Salazar, director of the Southeast Asia Regional Institute for Community Education (SEARICE), said that a “Mafia-like export companies are enticing Third World countries with potential profits to be made from trade in toxins, adding that his group has a complete list of all the imports of waste into the Philippines in 1991 and demanded that government should tell the people where the toxins went.

SEARICE said that from February 1 to March 31, 1992 alone there were 58 shipments of this plastic garbage export to the country or a total of 5,385,902 pounds (more than 2 million kilos).         

Options

Hernandez said we cannot completely do away with plastic products.  These are already part of our modern lives.   But we should be more careful and discriminating in our use of it.  Above all, stakeholders (manufacturers, consumers, that government) must take responsibility for the hazards plastics bring to our shared environment.

On the demand side, there is a need to rethink of our consumption pattern and the use especially of single-use packaging types of plastic, Hernandez said.

Environmental sustainability should be given higher value over convenience, efficiency and lower prices of plastics, he added.

He also said that the solution is already in the law, in which the framework of how to deal with solid plastic wastes is mandated by RA 9003.

For instance, the National Solid Waste Management Commission, which is mandated to implement the ecological management act, specifically in listing down highly toxic and undesirable plastic types used in various packaging product, should do its job, he said.

He observed though that of the members of the commission, two representatives come from the plastic industry, two from government and one from non-government organizations. With the composition, a truthful listing of toxic products would be hard to come by.

On a brighter note, Hernandez said there are examples of successful experiments in the reduction of plastic rubbish.   One is the Dhaka approach, where the government imposes outright ban on the use of plastic bags in some places, especially in sensitive ecological systems like river networks.

Another is the Ireland approach, wherein the government imposes higher taxes on plastic products to discourage wanton use of plastics.

Hernandez also observed that in the Philippines, plastic manufacturer, producers, and retailers make a killing on their business because they are totally free from the responsibility of the cost of disposal.

Greenpeace suggests that some kind of a “sin tax” should be imposed on the plastic industry.

Because of the proliferation and wide consumer acceptance of cheap plastic products, the development of alternative materials has been pushed at the margins, and that no businessman in his right mind would venture into doing a business that would surely lose for lack of patrons.

Because of this, Greenpeace was forced to do a thing it always hates to do.  After the press conference it organized on the issue of the oil spill in Guimaras aboard MY Esperanza, it served food to the members of media in plastic bags and Styrofoam.