Here in the City of San Pablo, we just celebrated our Fiesta (Festival) in honor of the Saint after whom our City is named. This is a nine-day celebration with daily church processions and nightly street parties ending on January 15, 2016.  As you can imagine, there is a lot of litter that comes out of this long celebration. 

One such trash is the colorfol buntings (banderitas) that hang in rows along the streets.  The whole area that is celebrating the festival has buntings all over the place.  They may look very beautiful but it surely becomes a problem when the festival is over and it?s clean-up time. Try to imagine hundreds, possibly thousands of meters of buntings all over the City.

The material used to make the buntings is plastic.  Sometimes it is recycled from plastic bags.  But it transforms into a lot of trash after the Festival when they take it down.  An environmental watchdog group, EcoWaste Coalition says: they are extremely wasteful and contribute to the cost of garbage disposal.

And now, we are entering the campaign period in the Philippines with elections in May 2016.  It?s going to be another major problem because the candidates will start putting up their tarpaulins to get people to vote for them.  There must be some other way to celebrate a festival and conduct an election without generating so much plastic trash. 

Let?s think about it. What are people doing about this in your part of the world?