Burning trash

Every time I pass a pile of garbage on our streets, what I smell is not just rot. I smell system failure. And we keep debating waste management as if we still have the luxury of choosing only elegant solutions. It is like being in a burning house and wasting time arguing over the best brand of fire extinguisher.

For years, the debate on waste-to-energy (WTE) has been paralyzed by a category error. We argue about it as if it were either an environmental or an energy issue. We want energy, but we shun incineration because burning trash releases carbon. Meantime, we build garbage mountains in landfills.

It is time to be honest about what WTE actually is for our country. It is not about generating electricity. Electricity is the byproduct. WTE is about waste reduction, a sanitation machine, a way to stop garbage from polluting and overwhelming our land, waterways, and coastlines.

Admittedly, the global conversation on incineration is changing. As the world decarbonizes, facilities that burn plastic, which is fossil-based, are becoming unpopular. Critics also warn against cities building WTE plants that must be fed trash for decades to remain profitable, quietly discouraging recycling.

These are valid concerns. But we must not confuse the “First World” dilemma of improving or optimizing an already functioning waste disposal system with the “Third World” crisis of basic sanitation. Countries that incinerate have gone through a long process to achieve circularity. We should expect to do the same.

When we invoke the Clean Air Act to block modern garbage incineration, we delude ourselves into thinking we are choosing clean over dirty air. In reality, we are just moving pollution. We shift it from a smokestack, which can be scrubbed and regulated, to a landfill, where the damage is wide and poorly policed.

We send garbage to open dumps where it decomposes and generates methane, adding to global warming. Landfills also produce leachate that seeps into our ground water. Plastic fragments and microplastics in landfills also end up in our waterways. We congratulate ourselves for rejecting incineration, for cleaning our air, while we poison our land and our water.

If we want to talk about sustainability, we need to stop treating landfills as a morally superior alternative to burning trash. They are not. A landfill is not a quiet hill of refuse. It is a living mass that can shift, fail, and bury. Look at Cebu. A trash slide at a landfill killed dozens of people in January.

Last year, a fire at a landfill in Rodriguez, Rizal sent smoke drifting into Quezon City, prompting health advisories and evacuations. There was heat, methane, and a fire that was hard to extinguish because it burned from within the pile. In 2024, a dumpsite fire in Talisay City also triggered evacuations.

These were not freak accidents. These were inevitable consequences of a disposal strategy that relied on piling up tons of garbage and praying that gravity, weather, and governance would cooperate. They seldom do. Of those three factors, only one is controllable, and even that only barely.

So when we talk about WTE, let us at least describe the real tradeoff. The choice is not burning versus clean air. The choice is managed combustion versus unmanaged decay. It is regulated emissions versus leachate. Better yet, it is smoke monitoring versus land and groundwater contamination.

I am not suggesting that we burn everything. But I am suggesting that we look at our garbage problem, recognize the tradeoffs, and decide on the best approach for solid waste management without having to choose clean air exclusively over green space and safe water.

Garbage is, ultimately, a space problem. When Metro Manila needs to dump its garbage outside its own geography, it exports the problem to someone else’s backyard. The same goes for Baguio City, Boracay, and most other places that generate tons of garbage with perhaps no more place to put them. Waste get sent elsewhere.

By pushing WTE, my primary goal is not electricity but to stop garbage from encroaching on our space, and from polluting our land and water. We produce a lot of garbage, and we must reframe WTE as volume reduction, a way to create space, with electricity as the byproduct and a means to offset operating costs.

Incineration and combustion-based systems can reduce the volume of solid waste significantly. Admittedly, incineration also generates ash that requires space, secure handling, and disposal. Still, there is a world of difference between managing just ash and managing mountains of rotting mixed waste.

To handle incineration safely also requires investment in filtration and pollution control. It requires enforcement that does not bend. It also requires us to admit that our laws were written for a different technological moment. The Clean Air Act bans incineration, but what that ban legally covers remains debatable.

Unfortunately, the ban has also become a convenient excuse for doing nothing. The Clean Air Act is 25 years old. Modern thermal treatment is not the same as backyard burning. And modern WTE is not the same as the primitive incinerators that shaped public fear two decades ago.

Proponents now point to cleaner conversion technologies and advanced gas cleaning systems. But the real challenge is for a WTE facility to prove to the public that when it operates here, that it can meet strict emission standards continuously and consistently, and not just on inspection day.

We can argue that WTE is unnecessary with “zero waste.” But in the case of the Philippines, “zero waste” is a myth. Even if we banned single-use plastics tomorrow, and even if we enforced it with draconian rigor, we would still face tons of residual waste daily nationwide.

We generate garbage every day, without fail. Diapers. Contaminated packaging. Medical waste. Sludge. Materials that no recycler wants. They will not disappear just because we invoke zero waste. Trash will exist. In the last 20 years, we tried solid waste management while we pushed away thermal treatment. What do we have to show for it?

By refusing to build high-standard thermal treatment facilities because they are not circular enough, we choose landfills by default. We choose methane by default. We choose leachate by default. And by insisting on finding a perfect disposal system, we are losing the battle against garbage. Like the way we are losing the road maintenance battle to potholes.

The problem is not just technological. It is institutional. Few LGUs have the fiscal capacity to finance a modern WTE facility. Technical expertise is scarce. Oversight can be weak. There is also little incentive, at this point, to push WTE as a lot of people make money from hauling and dumping garbage.

A thermal treatment facility can disrupt this ecosystem. It centralizes disposal. It requires a fee that reflects the cost of processing, not just the cost of dumping. It also demands stable contracts, credible regulation, and competent monitoring, plus massive capital upfront.

But while we can aggressively reduce single-use plastics, enforce Extended Producer Responsibility, and build collection and sorting systems that make recycling real, we will still need high-standard thermal treatment for residual waste as an alternative to landfills. Medical waste, for one, must be burned.

Let’s look at a 20-year transition. Within that period, we can permit and support thermal treatment for residual waste that cannot be recycled or composted in practice. Mandate the highest emission standards and require continuous emission monitoring. Emission data must be public, and real-time.

If the smokestack emits dangerous levels of pollutants, the plant shuts down automatically. No human intervention. No discretion. No explanation. No room for a bribe. The plant does not reopen until its operator, whether government or private, fixes the problem to everybody’s satisfaction.

But for this to happen, legislators should review the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Solid Waste Management Act. These laws are now well over 20 years old. We should audit how these laws, and their implementing rules, have actually served us in the last two decades.

In particular, we must review the incineration ban to allow a pragmatic transition. The Clean Air Act is central to this debate. We should enshrine technological neutrality: if an incineration facility can prove it meets stringent emission standards, the method should not be categorically banned.

Rejecting thermal treatment is not the same as protecting the environment. We push clean air while getting buried in trash that takes up land and pollutes water. There will always be arguments for and against waste incineration. But now is the time to decide. I believe it is time we light the fire.

Marvin Tort is a former managing editor of BusinessWorld, and a former chairman of the Philippine Press Council.

matort@yahoo.com