DESPITE Cebu City’s garbage crisis turning from bad to worse in the aftermath of the Jan. 8 Binaliw landfill disaster, Mayor Nestor Archival says “No” to waste-to-energy. Waste-to-energy, or WtE, has become the most talked-about quick-fix solution to Metro Cebu’s waste management problem after Binaliw. Mayor Archival, however, is looking beyond the short term to longer-term impacts on health and the environment associated with toxic emissions and fly ash.
Strong opposition from the residents of what would have been the host community of Cebu City’s first incinerator spelled the end of the P5-billion New Sky Energy WtE project late last year. A few weeks later, Typhoon Tino flooded much of Metro Cebu. Ghastly piles of garbage and debris were washed into waterways and coastal areas. The Binaliw tragedy further confirmed the ugly side of our way of life: the trash that doesn’t go away. Years of implementation of “plastic bag-free days” notwithstanding, the idea of generating less garbage has yet to be planted. The “no plastic bag day” has simply become “lousy paper bag day.” Lousy because while the bag may be biodegradable, it is of such poor quality that it can only be used once.
So here we are, facing a serious garbage disposal crisis that has been years in the making, yet little has been done to forestall it.
Cebu provincial Gov. Pam Baricuatro, like her predecessor, sees WtE as the way forward for Cebu. The province will establish two waste-to-energy facilities that will serve the northern and southern LGUs, respectively. In December 2022, then-governor Gwendolyn Garcia signed an agreement with a Dutch company to construct a WtE. That was the first and last we heard of that. Most likely, the project failed to secure funding. WtE is a relatively expensive solid waste management system. Considering Cebu Province’s still relatively high poverty incidence — 21.9 percent compared to the national rate of 15.5 percent (PSA 2023) — it is absurd to put scarce resources into expensive, imported WtE technology. In addition, transportation of trash from municipalities to centralized facilities will add to traffic congestion. Traffic has been a major problem in some parts of Cebu for a long time. It is an unpleasant factor in the tourism experience and a great inconvenience to locals, residents and businesses alike.
Because WtE is an expensive technology whose costs will be borne by the public one way or another, proponents use the electricity-generating potential of WtE as the main selling point. But this electricity doesn’t come cheap. The government must either subsidize the tipping fees or offer a higher rate for the electricity to make the undertaking financially viable to the WtE operator. Yeonji Lee and Hoang Thanh Vinh, in a commentary posted on the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) Vietnam website, remind us that waste-to-energy is about the optimization of recovery of energy from waste that cannot be recycled. Energy and natural resources go into making the things that we mindlessly throw away and incinerating them recovers only a fraction of that energy.
Indeed, incineration significantly reduces the volume of garbage. Landfilling everything is obviously physically and environmentally unsustainable. Our Southeast Asian neighbors, such as Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam and Indonesia, are seeing the technology as the best available alternative to their overflowing landfills. Vietnam, for example, embraced the technology after having been introduced to Chinese-made grate furnaces that “devour” everything, including wet, unsorted trash that is common in many Southeast Asian countries.
As of late 2024, however, Vietnam hadn’t solved the problem of fly ash for its first WtE. The WtE was funded by the Asian Development Bank and began commercial operations in September 2020. Some 14,000 tons of fly ash had been placed in waterproof bags and stored inside a warehouse, according to reports from 2024. Bottom ash is considered nonhazardous and used in roads and construction.
Whether or not fly and bottom ashes are hazardous or not, however, may not actually be known. The high cost of emission tests for the most toxic pollutants means that testing is done once in a blue moon only, or not done at all. Nguen Xuan Quang of Hanoi University told Dialogue Earth (October 2024) that testing for the highly toxic dioxins and furans could cost as much as $900: “So environmental measurements in these WtE plants typically mean measuring common pollutants, not dioxins or furans, due to the high costs and limited resources.” Without stringent monitoring of emissions, whatever the cost, the actual environmental and health impacts will not be known.
Cebu City Mayor Archival is cautious about jumping onto the WtE wagon, showing that he puts the precautionary principle over political expediency. But unless the city makes headway in reducing the volume of trash that cannot be recycled, WtE will soon be back on the agenda.