By Catherine J. Teves
The government targets airing during this year’s Metro Manila Film Festival (MMFF) a movie plug advocating solid waste management (SWM) to help boost public action on waste diversion through reusing and recycling trash, lessening volume of garbage which authorities link to flooding, particularly amid climate change.
Authorities concerned are bullish about such exposure for SWM, noting MMFF is among the country's top star-studded Christmas events that people look forward to every year.
â€The five-minute plug will document best SWM practices that local government units (LGUs) and people can look into and adapt,†said Emelita Aguinaldo, chief of the National Solid Waste Management Commission (NSWMC) which is supporting the project.
She cited the need to further push the SWM bid, reporting that waste diversion compliance of LGUs nationwide is still far from desirable.
â€Compliance of Metro Manila’s 17 LGUs is better at some 34 percent,†she said.
NSWMC targets achieving a 50 percent waste diversion rate by 2016, she noted.
The government is promoting waste diversion to help reduce the volume of garbage for disposal, saying nearly half of waste generated can be reused and recycled.
Latest available data show Metro Manila generates daily some 8,000 tons of garbage, accounting for nearly 27 percent of the estimated 30,000 tons of waste produced nationwide everyday.
Authorities continue cautioning against dumping garbage particularly in water bodies.
Aside from polluting water, they warned that garbage reduces the water-carrying capacity of the water bodies and blocks drainage so risk increases for overflows and flooding during inclement weather.
Experts expect climate change to drive increasingly violent weather disturbances as well as to bring forth hotter summers and wetter rainy seasons in the country.
Last week, the Environmental Management Bureau (EMB) and the Metropolitan Manila Development Authority (MMDA) signed the memorandum of agreement for the movie plug project’s implementation.
â€EMB will provide some P500,000 to fund the project,†Aguinaldo said.
She noted that MMDA will attend to arrangements for the plug’s airing during the Metro Manila Film Festival.
MMDA head Francis Tolentino is overall chairman of the MMFF Executive Committee which oversees the festival's activities.
The 2011 MMFF raked in revenues exceeding P630 million, MMDA reported earlier.
Aguinaldo isn't discounting the possibility that the plug will be aired on television as well.
For 2020 and 2050, the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (PAGASA) earlier projected an increase in the number of days with maximum temperature exceeding 35 degrees Celsius.
"Heavy daily rainfall will continue to become more frequent, extreme rainfall is projected to increase in Luzon and Visayas only but the number of dry days is expected to increase in all parts of the country in 2020 and 2050," PAGASA noted.
PAGASA's projections use the medium-range greenhouse gas emission scenario.
Such scenario indicates a future world "of very rapid economic growth, with global population peaking in mid-century and declining thereafter and there is rapid introduction of new and more efficient technologies with energy generation balanced across all sources," PAGASA said. - PNA
Linkback:
https://tubagbohol.mikeligalig.com/index.php?topic=51743.0
