Stop Digging Holes, Beat Landfill Politics

If Iloilo is serious about fixing its garbage problem, it has to stop treating sanitary landfills as the finish line and start treating them as the costly, land-hungry last resort they were always meant to be.

Republic Act 9003 pushed local government units (LGUs) toward engineered disposal because open dumps were a public health disaster, but it never promised that burying mixed waste forever was a modern environmental strategy.

The province’s own plan still talks about at least one sanitary landfill per congressional district, yet everyone knows why that keeps failing: nobody wants to host it, nobody trusts the safeguards, and nobody wants to be the neighbor that inherits everyone else’s stink.

That is why Governor Arthur Defensor Jr.’s interest in a modular approach, and MetPower Venture Partners Holdings, Inc.’s pitch to convert residuals into refuse-derived fuel, is worth taking seriously, because it moves the conversation from “where do we hide it” to “how do we use what’s left.”

The climate case against the dump-and-forget mindset is getting harder to ignore, with landfill methane repeatedly flagged as a major emissions problem, including findings that many sites leak persistently and at levels higher than inventories capture.

Land is the other quiet crisis, because once you commit hectares to a landfill, you do not just lose a piece of real estate, you inherit decades of leachate management, community distrust, and a political problem that gets uglier every election cycle.

So yes, the “death of the landfill” is a direction Iloilo should embrace, but with an important caveat: what dies is the habit of dumping mixed waste, while a small, tightly regulated landfill for inert rejects and process residues may still be unavoidable under today’s law.

Waste-to-energy and RDF are not magic words, and the Philippines has a long, messy argument about incineration, which is why the Supreme Court of the Philippines’ line matters here: the Clean Air Act does not absolutely ban incineration, but bans burning processes that emit poisonous and toxic fumes.

The Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) has also issued rules for waste-to-energy facilities and clarified environmental compliance requirements, which means the province can demand, in writing, the exact emissions controls, monitoring systems, and disposal plans that the proponent must meet before anything is built.

The procurement side needs the same discipline, because Defensor is right to be wary of “technology … not even tested,” and “tested” cannot mean a glossy presentation or a single pilot run that nobody outside the proponent gets to scrutinize.

At minimum, the province should require independent performance data from operating facilities, third-party technical due diligence, and contract terms that do not punish LGUs for succeeding at waste reduction, especially through minimum volume guarantees or take-or-pay commitments.

If this arrives as an unsolicited proposal, Iloilo should lean into competitive tension, because the country’s Public-Private Partnership (PPP) framework recognizes Swiss challenge and comparative proposals precisely to protect the public from sweetheart terms dressed up as innovation.

Then there is the “not in my backyard” deadlock, and modular plants will not solve it automatically, because LGUs can still block sites, delay permits, and turn every hearing into a referendum on who gets to say no.

The province should force fairness into the system through enforceable inter-LGU agreements, transparent cost-sharing, and a public district-by-district waste map that shows who generates residuals, who ships them out, and who benefits when someone else hosts the solution.

RDF itself must be handled with eyes open, because it often ends up in cement kilns as alternative fuel, a practice already expanding in the Philippines, and it raises legitimate questions about monitoring, transparency, and what exactly communities are being asked to breathe.

The clean way forward is not to romanticize either landfills or waste-to-energy, but to set a hard hierarchy: enforce segregation and diversion first, convert what truly remains with audited, compliant technology second, and landfill only the smallest, safest fraction last.