MikeLigalig.com

By Danny O. Calleja

(PNA) – Commercial establishments, including public markets and sidewalk vendors, in the province of Sorsogon will soon be prohibited from using thin wrappers and single-use plastic bags.

The prohibition takes place upon implementation of the ordinance authored by provincial legislative board member Vladimir Ramon Frivaldo and unanimously approved by the Sangguniang Panlalawigan (SP) last week.

The ordinance seeks to penalize the use of plastic materials among commercial establishments in the locality.

The move to ban the use of plastic as wrappers in commercial establishments is “long overdue” considering the harmful contributions of this kind of material to the environment, Frivaldo said.

“The ubiquitous thin plastic bags are blamed for polluting our environment to the highest level. It chokes birds and fishes, clog drainage, canals, waterways to cause destructive or even deadly floods,” Frivaldo said in the resolution, copy of which he furnished the PNA over the weekend.

He said “an estimated 500 billion to one trillion plastic bags are used worldwide every year and most, if not all of these end up as trash doing terrible thing to our environment—pollution of long term duration considering the fact that this material does not easily decompose nor it can be recycled”.

In the Philippines, government data indicate that plastic comprises 15 percent of Metro Manila’s solid waste, with food and kitchen waste accounting for about 45 percent, paper 16 percent, glass and wood 9 percent and other discards 15 percent.

According to the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), some 756,986 kilos of garbage were collected during the coastal cleanup operations in 2009, with plastic bags constituting 300,176 kilos or almost half of the retrieved garbage from shorelines and waterways nationwide.

Given the ill-effect that these plastic bags contribute to the environment, including a recent finding that the inks and colorants used in some of it contain lead, a toxic chemical, both the national and local governments have been slow-moving in undertaking measures against them.

“This ordinance, the first of its kind in the Bicol region will compel stores and similar commercial establishments in the province to do away with this kind of plastic bag as wrappers thus, reducing the release of pollutants into our environment,” he said.

The ordinance provides for penalties to violators ranging from cash fines of P3,000 to P10,000 and suspension or cancellation of business permits which means closure of operation of a commercial establishment, Frivaldo said.

Its implementation has been assigned to the local government units composed of this city, the provincial capital and 14 municipalities of the province through their respective Business Permit and Licensing Offices, he said.

Sorsogon Bishop Arturo Bastes commended the move which he said goes by the recent “Global Work Party”, an ecological weapon against global warming of the Church and ecological groups seeking solutions to the climate crisis.

The Church and ecological groups' move pushes on the switching from plastic bags to bayong (native basket) as wrappers provided by the commercial establishments to shoppers to help in attaining the safe upper limit of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which scientists set at 350 parts per million (the current level being 390 ppm), Bastes said.

“We wanted to help in reversing the statistics and in stabilizing the earth’s climate by getting rid of plastic bags and shifting to the bayong and the Frivaldo ordinance will do a lot for Sorsogon insofar as this campaign is concerned," the bishop said.

Frivaldo, a grandson of the late Juan Frivaldo who served as governor of the province for eight terms starting in the early 1950s, is a neophyte provincial legislator who had assumed the role of a people’s watchdog in the provincial board. He belongs to the rank of fresh, young bloods among local political wannabes.

The former governor died at 86 in 2000 shortly before he could be reinstalled to his 9th term after the Commission on Elections (COMELEC) found out that he was the real winner in the 1998 gubernatorial race and not Raul Lee who was the one proclaimed by the provincial board of canvassers.

The elder Frivaldo was incumbent governor seeking relection during that election and believing that he was cheated, he filed a protest with the Commission on Elections (Comelec) and recount of votes in contested voting precincts in the province showed him the winner. All the poll body could do to give him justice, however, was a decision posthumously proclaiming his victory. (PNA)

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