100 tons of regret

Seventy-four tons of garbage in three weeks, and the count may top 100 before the crews are done. That is the haul from a single stretch of the Jaro River, and the city government is right to call it alarming. The workers wading through it deserve the city’s thanks. The river deserves a harder question: how did 100 tons get there, and who let it?

General Services Office chief Neil Ravena gave the answer without quite meaning to. The volume, he said, points to years of accumulation. Years. That is not a freak event nor a storm’s debris. It is the sediment of a collection-and-enforcement system that has not been doing its job along the Jaro and La Paz stretch of the river, season after season, until the backlog became a 100-ton emergency.

The clearest tell is the plan itself. The city will install waste traps at the Tabuc Suba boundary and across seven barangays to find out which district dumps the most. The traps exist because the city does not yet know who is fouling its own waterway. Identification is being announced as a discovery, when it should already be the baseline of any functioning waste program.

The law is not silent here. The Ecological Solid Waste Management Act of 2000 already requires every city to run a working Solid Waste Management Board, segregate at source, and police illegal dumping. So the questions for City Hall are concrete. What is the actual collection coverage in Banuyao, Baldoza, Caingin, Hinactacan, Tabuc Suba, Ingore, and Ticud? And how many anti-dumping citations has the city issued in the years it now blames for the backlog? If the honest answer is “few,” then Jaro did not fail the city, but the other way around.

None of this diminishes the cleanup. Rather, it reframes matters. A trap that names the worst-dumping district is worth something only if something follows the naming. Ravena’s hope that “there will be no disposal” is more of a wish than policy. What residents need to hear next is the mechanism: the fines, the collection routes that will finally reach underserved barangays, the recovery capacity to handle what gets pulled out, and the public-education push to change the behavior upstream. Without that, the city will be back next May, mobilizing another batch of workers to haul another 74 tons, and calling it news.

And about those workers. The 70 people doing the dirtiest part of this job are TUPAD beneficiaries — disadvantaged and displaced Ilonggos — clearing toxic sediment for PHP 550 a day on a 31-day contract. The city says it gave them prophylaxis against waterborne disease, which is the right call and also a frank admission of how hazardous the work is. Whether that wage is fair hazard pay, and whether anyone will monitor their health after the contract ends, are questions the city should be ready to answer. The people cleaning up a public failure should not be the ones absorbing its risks on the cheap.

There is a national frame worth keeping in view. Most of what came out of the Jaro was single-use plastic — the same packaging the Extended Producer Responsibility Act of 2022 was meant to make large companies answer for. Yet the cost here falls on a coastal city and minimum-wage labor, not on the firms that put the sachets on the shelf. A river choked with plastic is a local problem with a supply chain standing behind it.

The Jaro cleanup is a decent response to a bad situation. The measure of whether the city is serious will not be the tonnage it announces in June. It will be whether anyone is held to account before the next 100 tons pile up — and whether, a year from now, there is less to fish out of the Jaro, not more.