Prime Minister Justin Trudeau greets Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte before the opening ceremony of the 31st Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Summit in Manila in 2017.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau greets Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte before the opening ceremony of the 31st Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Summit in Manila in 2017.
CALGARY—Something is rotten in the state of the Philippines, and it’s 103 containers of garbage.
A stink has been raised between the southeast Asian archipelagic country and Canada, as Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte has threatened to declare war if Canada doesn’t take back a mass of trash that has been sitting in a port near the country’s capital of Manila for nearly six years. The containers are filled with household waste — like plastic bottles and bags, newspapers and used diapers from Canadian trash bins — despite being labelled as plastics for recycling.
A private Canadian company dumped the containers in 2013 and 2014. Since then, Canada has been trying to convince the Philippines to dispose of the garbage there, but a Filipino court ordered the trash should be returned to Canada in 2016. (About two dozen containers were disposed of in 2015 in the Philippines. The rest are still sitting in the port.)
ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW
ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW
Environment Minister Catherine McKenna said Wednesday she thinks a solution can be found “in the coming weeks.” But the emerging international incident has raised many questions. Among them: What is Canadian garbage doing in the Philippines, and whose responsibility is it?
Turns out, developed countries often send recyclables overseas, where other countries make a business out of reusing them or breaking them down. Up until 2018, China handled recyclable waste from around the world to use to build their own materials. But China ended this policy, in part, because they received too many contaminated materials that couldn’t be reused.
Israel Dunmade, a sustainable engineering professor at Mount Royal University, speculated these containers may have ended up in the Philippines, labelled as recycling, after being turned away from China for holding contaminated waste. Dunmade also pointed out Canada may have another way to deal with this mess besides returning it to landfills on home soil, which would cost millions to ship.
“The best way to approach it would probably be to find an incineration facility that could take it,” Dunmade said. “It might not need to come back to Canada, depending on the agreement that could be made and if they can find any facility that could help to process it.”
According to Kathleen Cooper, a senior researcher at the Canadian Environmental Law Association, the Canadian government should be required to remove the garbage, and either dispose of it in municipal landfills or incinerate it.
“This is a nasty mess that has to be dealt with as garbage. It can’t go to a recycling plant and be processed, because it’s all bundled grossness. It’s not like you can separate it,” Cooper said.
ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW
ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW
“That’s why we’re always told to wash our containers and have a clean load when we put things out to recycling, because you contaminate the load if it’s not clean.”
International law is on the Philippines’ side. The United Nations’ Basel Convention is a treaty that went into force in 1992 and forbids countries from dumping illegal waste in developing nations without their informed consent. Canada has ratified this convention, meaning they’re legally bound to it.
This is why the Canadian government’s inaction to remove the waste and find a way to dispose of it themselves is illegal, Cooper said. She added that even if the containers were sent by a Canadian company, it’s the government’s responsibility to clean it up.
But as a taxpayer, Cooper hopes the government is able to find a way for the company behind the mess to pay for it.
“This company seems to be getting off scot-free so far,” Cooper said. “I think we need answers to that, and I would think the federal government is trying to get answers to that.”
ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW
ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW
The Basel Convention also states that if the receiving country declares the waste as hazardous, which the Philippines have, the exporting country has to take it back.
For now, Duterte has set a one-week removal deadline to line up with the UN’s Conference of the Parties next week, a formal meeting of the countries involved in the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change. It also marks the 30th anniversary of the creation of the Basel Convention.
Cooper believes this could provoke a reply from Canada, and this has also been why NGOs (or non-governmental organizations) have pushed for Canada to act on the waste issue for the past four months, knowing this meeting was coming.
“They need to abide by the Basel Convention, which is something that we have agreed to and was put in place to prevent something exactly like this situation from happening,” Cooper said.
“The Philippines refuses to deal with it. They could very well, like most places in the world, certainly all over Canada, be running out of landfill capacity. And why should they have to deal with 77 containers of Canadian garbage?”
ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW
ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW
With files from The Canadian Press
Andrew Jeffrey Andrew Jeffrey is a former reporter for Star Calgary.
