I watched a a discussion on television about municipal waste or garbage from Canada that was shipped to the Philippines and misdeclared as recyclables.  There are about 50 container vans full of garbage that has been arriving in the Philippine port in Manila since June 2013.  When some of the container vans were opened by Customs officials, they saw not recyclables but mixed garbage.  If they were recyclables they would have to be similar type of item in one container.

There are two versions of what the container vans contain.  The health advocacy group and other NGOs are saying it contains toxic waste, while the Canadians says it consists mostly of plastics and household waste and nothing toxic in it.

According to Ana Capunan of the health advocacy group Ang Nars, the Basel Convention requires that the originating country  (in this case, Canada) has the responsibility of exporting the garbage back to their country.  She also said that no one is paying for the cost of holding the container vans in the Customs storage. So far, she said the importer (Chronic Plastics, based in the Philippines) has only paid P900/ton.  But actually, the cost of the container vans sitting in the Philippine port is around P66 million. That doesn?t even include the cost to disinfect required by the Department of Health because it poses a health risk to workers in the port.

But the Philippine and Canadian governments have been trying to fix the problem.  There is an inter-agency group of the Philippine government composed of the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) , Department of Energy and Natural Resources (DENR) and the Bureau of Customs trying to resolve this together with the Canadian government. 

It is really a private matter, which their government just learned about so the Canadian Ambassador to the Philippines, His Excellency Neil Reeder, said that they have found a solution, which is to process the waste locally.  If this option is agreed upon, then all costs will be covered by the Canadian government.

But DENR Secretary Ramon Paje sees re-exporting the garbage as the only option.  He feels that treating the wastes in the Philippines will become a precedent and will make other countries look at the Philippines as a ?dumping ground for foreign garbage?.

Next to this, I would like to look at the dumping of garbage by large ships along shipping lanes in the oceans.  I saw in some initial research that ships have to hold their solid garbage and it gets dumped properly when they are docked.  But they can dump their sewer waste into the sea or ocean as long as it is not close to the land.  I?m wondering though if they are so far out at sea, who will stop them from dumping their garbage into the water?