AWAY from the public eye until Jan. 8, in the small mountain barangay of Binaliw, is the private landfill — operational since 2019 — that has been receiving the bulk of Cebu City’s garbage. It’s where our single-use coffee cups, empty shampoo sachets, wet wipes and other — mostly plastic — trash end up. Then on Jan. 8, hours after thousands had joined the Penitential Walk for Jesus, marking the official start of the annual Fiesta Señor, a portion of the enormous pile of trash collapsed. A staff house and other structures were crushed by the avalanche. Dozens of employees were trapped.
Garbage trucks from the LGUs that utilize the Binaliw landfill — which was acquired by Prime Waste Solutions three years ago — have been unable to unload as retrieval operations continue. The Cebu City government was forced to temporarily suspend the already inadequate garbage collection while scouting for an alternative disposal site.
This isn’t the first time that the city finds itself in such a predicament. Yet, despite experiencing the sudden closure of landfills in the past, with resulting uncollected garbage piling up everywhere, the city’s solid waste management system, as discussed in last week’s column, remains inefficient. The city lacks operational material recovery facilities and has ignored instituting meaningful waste minimization policies.
The city has been preparing to finally implement waste segregation at source — through a “no segregation, no collection” scheme — but do the officials and personnel in charge of the implementation possess the necessary competence and experience? No less than Emma Ramas, chairperson of Cebu City’s Solid Waste Management Board, believes that households “should take care of their own biodegradable waste — use it to grow food, turn it into compost, or even earn from it,” as reported by CDN Digital on Jan. 3, 2026. Cebu City is a highly urbanized city. Most of its 1 million residents are busy earning a living in full-time jobs. They live in apartments, boarding houses and other tiny spaces in highly congested neighborhoods. One thing is to separate biodegradable waste; another is to manage it.
Limiting the discourse to biodegradable and non-biodegradable leaves a lot to individual interpretation. Most waste falls within some gray zone. For instance, paper may be biodegradable, but most of it has plastic coatings. Also, inks and bleaching agents used on paper could contaminate compost. According to Ramas, it will be the garbage truck drivers and loaders who have the final say: “They are the ones who can say, ‘We will not accept this because it is not segregated’” (CDN Digital, Jan. 3, 2026). Is the public assured that these personnel have comprehensive knowledge about all types of waste? The city government must enforce waste segregation in a cooperative, fair, inclusive and practical manner that ensures that waste collection and diversion goals are met.
The Binaliw disaster happened as communities and civil society organizations in over 90 countries, including the Philippines, observed International Zero Waste Month. The idea of Zero Waste still hasn’t gained traction in Cebu. Even the significant savings of scarce public funds that could be realized with waste minimization and improved recycling rates have not motivated city officials to address the root causes of the waste management problem. Whether we like it or not, had the city government done its job and implemented RA 9003, we wouldn’t be facing such an imminent garbage crisis as a result of the closure of the Binaliw landfill.
We can learn from the failures and successes of other LGUs. For example, the City of San Fernando, Pampanga, with a population of 377,000, had, as early as 2018, reduced the portion of its solid waste being landfilled to 20 percent. Instead of studying expensive high-tech waste-to-energy facilities in Singapore and Japan, we should look to Philippine cities such as San Fernando and learn from them.
The tons of garbage that came down on the workers at the Binaliw landfill is the other side of our modern, consumption-driven economy. Having a truly clean community goes beyond “proper disposal.” Plastics, in particular, pollute throughout their lifecycles as they are made from fossil fuels and chemicals. US-based Ocean Conservancy, in its recently released report “Collective Currents: Global Solutions to End Ocean Plastics,” emphasizes the “enormity” of the global plastic waste crisis. The crisis is “driven largely by the widespread use of single-use, disposable plastics,” and it “poses urgent threats to ecosystems, human health and, due to the emissions associated with plastics production, climate stability,” Ocean Conservancy warns. Focusing on “quick fixes” such as waste-to-energy incineration “only delays a truly circular economy and prolongs community and environmental harm.”
Binaliw is no longer far from the public eye. Videos and photos reveal the shocking reality of the skyscraper-high garbage mountain. The loss of so many lives is unfathomable. May this tragedy motivate us to embrace long-term, sustainable solutions rather than the usual expensive, politically expedient, superficial end-of-pipe solutions.
