BATANGAS – Dozens of volunteers managed to haul a total of 1,057 kilograms of garbage out from the waters of Hamilo Coast as part of International Coastal Clean-up Day (ICC) last Saturday.
It’s a small victory, says Ruel Bate, WWF-Philippines Environmental Educator. That’s a ton of trash out from the mangroves and beautiful shores of Hamilo Coast, but the volume still out there is staggering.
The good news is that the solutions with the most impact start at home, he pointed out.
ICC has been encouraging the public worldwide to participate in keeping our seas healthy for the last 30 years and its results are commendable. In 2014, over 560,000 volunteers around the world gathered a whopping 16 million pounds of trash.
It is, however, a mere fraction of the 17.6 billion pounds of junk dumped into our seas every day, according to the Living Blue Planet Report 2015. The Philippines ranks third among nations with the most ocean plastic pollution.
Bate shared with adobo that there was less trash for this year’s ICC in Hamilo Coast compared to 2014, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that the area is getting cleaner.
“There are years when the area is cleaner and somewhere there are heaps of junk everywhere. The wind and ocean currents are partly to blame so our success here is fantastic but not conclusive.”
Are the communities around Hamilo Coast to blame? Bate (pictured) said that the bulk of trash they collected were not directly from the area but actually drifted away from surrounding urban areas like Manila and Cavite.
He explained that the idea of the ICC is not to rid the ocean and coastal communities completely of trash, but to make a dent on people’s behavior, making realize that how they dispose waste in their homes affects people thousands of miles away.
“It’s not even how they dispose waste but how they buy things. Recalling the credo ‘Reduce, Reuse, Recycle,’ the first part is always to reduce. If you don’t need it, don’t buy it.”
He is also inviting brands to participate in driving awareness to its consumers. WFF recorded that the non-biodegradable debris they collected this year in Hamilo Coast were mostly plastics, food wrappers. Adobo participated in the cleanup and observed that most the junk collected were from FMCG brands.
“Are we going to blame the company or the consumer? Mostly, it’s the end user that’s at fault but companies have an important role in educating them about good practices. The greenest packaging material won’t matter if it still ends up in the sea.”
WWF-Philippines and Hamilo Coast, premier seaside development of the SM Group, have been long-term conversation allies since 2007.
