No Money?
A typical day in the life of an average Filipino family starts with the father leaving the house for work, the mother doing the household chores, and the children either playing or studying at school. With the price of commodities steadfastly coming to a high, an alternative source of income has become a must for every Pinoy.
Now, what would be the cheapest, easiest way for the average Pinoy family to earn money, without having to invest on anything, and without having to leave the house? The answer, manage and sell garbage.
From the traditional bote-dyaryo to junkshops, to materials recovery facilities to waste trade markets at the malls, selling garbage has never been easier, and better. With all these development, every Pinoy family has an all-access pass to an alternative livelihood where trash becomes cash.
Munting Bahay Kubo.
“Ang basura dito ay sari-sari.”
Based on the studies made by the National Solid Waste Management Commission, every Filipino generates an estimated half a kilo of waste each day. With an estimated population of eighteen million (2000 Census-based Population Projection, National Statistics Office), the total waste generation in Metro Manila alone could run up to 7,000 metric tons per day. Or, 210,000 metric tons per month. Or, 2,520,000 million metric tons per year. This is the amount of garbage being hauled to the landfills everyday, costing the government billions of pesos. The sad part is, instead of building schools and providing medicine for the poor, a bulk of the taxpayer’s money literally gets down the dumps. Now, that is a lot of waste. Luckily, we can control the way we manage garbage because of the total waste generated within every Pinoy home, 95% can still be reused, recycled, or composted, and only 5% are made up of residuals and special/hazardous waste (Waste Analysis and Characterization Survey, Asian Development Bank, 2003).
Now that we know why it is possible to manage garbage, the next question to answer is, “how”?
Becoming a Manager
Quality determines the price of a product, and the same goes when “marketing” garbage. To ensure that household wastes are not going to be “wasted”, every member of the family must become waste managers, and must learn to segregate. In the Do-It-Yourself Guide, Solid Waste Management Made Easy (published by the United Nations Development Programme), segregation at source is highlighted as the secret to an effective solid waste management.
Wondering what segregation is?
It is simply placing items in separate containers as we dispose of them.
Network at the Waste Market!
Doing business means having to partner with different organizations. In a macro-aspect, having to “market” solid waste includes coordinating with the barangays (local government units), private organizations, schools, commercial establishments, non-government organizations, group of recyclers, and the national government. Segregated wastes can be accommodated at the barangay’s Materials Recovery Facility (MRF). This is a required storage facility for segregated garbage for communities, with junkshops adopted as “official” MRFs in some barangays.
Now, for a more modern option, we can just go to SM, Ayala malls, Robinsons and trade-in wastes for cash, or for other useful items. The SM Waste Market offers venues for us to trade-in our recyclable materials. These are junk electrical equipment and appliances; used lead acid batteries; used PET plastic bottles; and aluminum or tin cans. The Waste Market also serves as a drop-off area for polystyreneor styrofoam scrap, junk cellphones and cellphone batteries.
Ayala Malls, on the other hand, have started as Recyclables Collection Event during Earth Day and Environment Month and then continued as Waste Markets since September 2006, and since then, have conducted exchanges in Glorietta in Makati City, in Alabang Town Center in Muntinlupa, at the Bonifacio Global City, and most recently, at the TriNoma.
This is part of the series of successful endeavors taken by malls, to bridge the gap for a market for recyclables, to make waste trading more accessible for us who would want to recycle – and would want to earn from it. With the waste market at the malls, converting trash to cash is as easy as going on a shopping spree.
Get Creative
Now with some creativity, earning more money from waste is within every Pinoy family’s reach. Ever heard of Bazurabags? How about vermi-casts, organic fertilizers, briquettes, and flower pots out of sando bags and polystyrene? These are garbage, recycled and converted to “new” products, with the potential to rake money for the “creative entrepreneur”.
Take the case of the K.I.L.U.S. Foundation (in Barangay Ugong, Pasig), makers of the internationally-famous Bazurabags. K.I.L.U.S. Foundation is an association of the women of Barangay Ugong, who pioneered the search for livelihood opportunities from garbage, converting non-recyclable juice containers to colorful, fashionable bags.
Who would have thought that discarded doy packs could again be made useful? The women of K.I.L.U.S. Foundation did, and now, they are earning dollars from the bags. So for families with doy packs to discard, sell them to the K.I.L.U.S. Multi-purpose Environmental Cooperative at 36 C. Santos St., Ugong, Pasig City, or contact Ms. Editha Santiago, Chairperson of the Foundation. The municipality of E.B. Magalona even uses doy packs creatively
(and colorfully) for pedicabs and office chairs.
We have covered doy packs, so let’s go to another type of plastic, the
sando bags. Sunday markets will not be complete without having to go home with sando bags. Since 2004, the Environmental Management Bureau of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources launched a campaign dubbed, “Mag-Bawas Balot, Bawas Basura Tayo!”, targeted to minimize the use of sando bags among market vendors, and buyers, to prevent plastics from clogging esteros and canals.
Yearly, 330 kilometers of rivers and esteros, and sewerages, are being de-clogged of plastics, and 2,100 kilometers of roads being swept of 6 tons of garbage – a problem needed to be addressed by proper waste management, and by waste AVOIDANCE. Used sando bags can be sold in volume, can be recycled, and melted to become useful products like flower pots and foot walks. Used sando bags, other plastics, and even polystyrene (styropor) are melted using the Styro-Oven, a technology developed by the Industrial Technology Development Institute of the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) which melts polystyrene and plastic materials with used cooking oil to become useful products such as tiles, panel
boards, table tops, synthetic, lumber, school desks, and chairs. These are school and office furniture people would readily buy. In fact, some of these tiles will be used at the Pasig River linear parks! Corn husks are transformed into dolls and accessories, while concrete products are also being produced from the integrated solid waste management facility located at the Sitio Pantay, Dalig, Teresa in Rizal. Money equals Advocacy
Managing and selling wastes is not just about the money, it is also about the environment. When we segregate wastes, place them in MRFs, or recycle them into functional pieces, not only are we earning money but we are taking part in the global campaign to save our environment.
It also means having to follow (while earning) the Ecological Solid Waste Management Act of 2000 (Republic Act 9003), a law about the control, transfer, transport, processing, and disposal of solid waste in the country. In short, it is like hitting two birds with one stone.
From trading garbage at the waste markets to making crafts out of it, people are really earning cash from trash. When we do our share in segregating and recycling our garbage, we help in putting a stop to the 30 years garbage problem our country is facing, and at the same time, earn from it.
Earning money from garbage is easy, you surely will never look at garbage the same way again – for now, garbage has become a valuable resource. ###
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For more information on how to manage wastes, contact the National
Solid Waste Management Commission – Secretariat, Environmental
Management Bureau – DENR, 2nd Flr., HRD Building, DENR
Compound, Visayas Avenue, Diliman, Quezon City, Telephone
numbers: (632) 920-2252, 920-2279, 925-4796 / 925-4797 local 3
Originally Posted by sharkey360
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