Every time the rains come, the country is confronted by a familiar and rather embarrassing sight. Floodwaters rise. Waterways overflow. And from canals, creeks and drainage systems emerges a procession of plastic bags, bottles, discarded packaging and household refuse-the accumulated evidence of what we have thrown away and subsequently forgotten. Until the rain returns it to us.
President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. was confronted by precisely this problem when he inspected clearing operations at the Redemptorist waterway last Wednesday. The mountains of waste recovered from waterways tell us that flooding is not merely an engineering problem. Part of it is also a waste-management problem.
And in that visit, the President provided us a better way of looking at the mountain of garbage: it is not a crisis but it could be a harbinger of something worthwhile pursuing. He provided a lens to a new way of looking at that mountain. What if some of what we have been treating simply as garbage could become part of the country’s infrastructure?
That possibility is beginning to take physical form in New Clark City. The Bases Conversion and Development Authority and a Filipino-Indian consortium composed of ATD Waste to Energy Corp., Global Heavy Equipment and Construction Corp., and India-based Uttamenergy Ltd. are developing a P4-billion waste-to-energy facility on a four-hectare site there.
The numbers tell part of the story. The facility is designed to process about 600 metric tons of waste a day and generate approximately 12 megawatts of electricity, enough to supply the equivalent needs of more than 10,000 homes in Clark and surrounding communities. It is expected to reduce the volume of waste requiring final disposal by as much as 80 to 90 percent through controlled thermal treatment.
But those numbers are not what make this project particularly interesting. The more important development is the change in thinking behind them. For generations, our economic relationship with garbage has essentially ended at disposal. We consume something, discard what remains, collect it, transport it and then spend money finding somewhere to bury it.
In that model, waste is purely a liability. Waste-to-energy asks whether part of that liability can be converted into an economic asset. That is a profound distinction. Instead of merely paying to transport waste to increasingly scarce landfills, properly managed residual waste can potentially become feedstock for electricity generation. Something occupying land and threatening waterways acquires another possible economic use.
In a sense, waste should not be viewed merely as garbage but as a resource that, when responsibly managed, can help power homes and support economic activity. There is an elegant circularity to the proposition. The waste that helps clog the waterways can instead help generate the electricity that powers the city.
There is an interesting diplomatic footnote in the upcoming WtE plant in New Clark City. The project traces part of its momentum to President Marcos’s state visit to India in August last year, when waste-to-energy technology figured in discussions between Philippine and Indian business interests. A state visit, therefore, need not end with communiqués, handshakes and photographs.
Its real measure comes later- when an idea discussed across a conference table becomes steel, machinery, employment and electricity at home. New Clark City offers an appropriate laboratory for that proposition. It was conceived as a smart, green and future-ready metropolis. And now, it will have the country’s first waste-to-energy plant.
But there is something that citizens should take into account. If waste is to become a resource, it must first be properly separated, collected and managed. Citizens therefore become participants in the infrastructure even though they may never see the turbines inside the plant.
That may ultimately be the most interesting aspect of the New Clark City experiment. Infrastructure is usually something we imagine government building for us. Waste management is something the government must build with us. The difference is participation. Perhaps someday, when heavy rains again descend upon our cities, fewer mountains of garbage will come floating back to remind us of what we have discarded.
Not because we have simply found a better place to hide our waste. But because we finally learned that the things a nation throws away can reveal something about the way it thinks. For decades, we looked at garbage and saw something without value. New Clark City is attempting something different.
It is asking us to look at what we throw away-and see what it might still become.