by Linda B. Bolido

(Manila, Philippines, May 2003) While many homeowners brag about their expensive furniture or exquisite crystal and china collections, Luz Sabas takes pride in her trash. The 70-something Sabas, a former nurse, is one of the pioneering proponents of “zero garbage” in the Philippines. She started her efforts in 1968, when the idea of recycling garbage was not even a glimmer in the eyes of many environmentalists.

As a public health nurse in Manila she was assigned to help find a solution to a garbage crisis that struck the city decades ago. “When trash collectors went on strike in the 1960s, I visited homes and went to the old dumpsite that came to be known as the Smokey Mountain,” she said. “I realized there was very little trash that needed to be disposed of.”

Her cluttered home in a Manila suburb may mislead a first-time visitor into thinking that housekeeping is an alien concept to the occupants. Pointing out the origin of a number of objects around the house, however, she reveals a logic to the whole mess. She has made artificial flowers from corncobs, dried mango seeds, and old straw brooms. Her recliners and umbrellas are crafted from empty juice packs. An old swimming pool has been transformed into a fishpond. She has converted old tires into swings and ladders to entertain her grandchildren.

The plastic containers, glass bottles, tin cans, and other garbage she cannot find a use for she sends to places to be recycled or reused. Any other inorganic waste from her household she sends to other people to be ground up and made into bricks.

She composts the remaining organic trash and uses it to fertilize her home garden and the vegetables she had planted in vacant spaces around her neighborhood. The whole exercise leaves her with almost nothing to send to a dump.

The strike in the mid-1960s that left Manila with no trucks to collect garbage launched her “career” as a recycling advocate. City officials directed Sabas, who was then a health education supervisor, to find out what measures could be done to prevent the city from becoming a stinking pile of garbage.

At that time much of the world, not just the Philippines, did not imagine that garbage, polluting emissions, and other wastes would become a major environmental, economic, and political issue. “One half to three quarters of annual resource inputs to industrial economies are returned to the environment as wastes within a year,” according to The Weight of Nations, a report by the World Resources Institute (WRI). Japan produces 11 metric tons of waste per person each year, while each year 25 metric tons of waste are produced for every person in the United States.

Figuring out what to do with emissions, waste, and garbage has become an important issue in many countries. But it turns out that the solutions are not always simple. According to the WRI report, recycling made little difference to overall resource volumes going through economies. “To substantially reduce wastes,” said Emily Matthews, lead author of the report, “will require that economies adopt dramatically different technologies of production and the public adopt dramatically different patterns of consumption.”

During the Philippine garbage strike, Sabas went from house to house talking to residents about what they did with their trash. The trip was a revelation.

“I saw that everything can be used,” she said. “Whole families living near the dump waited for the trucks to unload their cargo then started sifting through the new pile separating cans, plastic, rubber, broken glass, and even tattered rags.” They skillfully sorted the trash with iron picks, then sold materials to waiting buyers. Twigs and branches, coconut husks and shells, corncobs, and remnants of sugar cane were set aside to be used as fuel.

The strike eventually came to an end, but the experience convinced Sabas that the total utilization of wastes was possible in households, schools, offices, and markets. She has since helped clean up her neighborhood, restoring a stream that had been polluted with sewer waste. She helped clean up subdivision’s informal garbage dump and convert it into an open-air recreation area.

Even with her low-tech approach to reducing wastes, however, Sabas’s efforts continue to be ahead of their time. “Even the determined efforts of industrialized countries to reduce waste, is reaping, at best, modest results,” said Matthews. “Resource efficiency gains have been more than offset by the tremendous scale of economic growth and consumer choices that favor energy- and material-intensive lifestyles.”

The WRI report emphasizes the need for developing countries, which are eager to reach the development level of industrialized nations, to draft policies that will effectively address the need to reduce resource use as well as waste generation.

Although Sabas has demonstrated that zero waste is not impossible to achieve, she still has to work hard at convincing others to follow her example. “Recycling is a low-cost, low-tech solution to the garbage problem but it is not easy to get people to adopt the habit. It requires a lot of patience,” she said. “I have to constantly monitor, remind and re-educate people.” (WRI Features, 918 words)