ILOILO City – The usefulness of election campaign materials such as posters and tarpaulins does not end on Election Day. In this southern city, these will be transformed into alternative fuel for cement manufacturing, or made into bags.
The first step, however, is to gather all these campaign materials.
According to Engineer Neil Ravena, assistant department head of the city government’s General Services Office (GSO) and officer-in-charge of the City Environment and Natural Resources Office (CENRO), they have so far collected five tons of election campaign materials from public plazas which the Commission on Elections designated as common campaign poster areas.
After the collection comes the segregation.
For this, the city government tapped waste pickers which have organized themselves into an association, said Ravena.
Campaign materials that are very soiled are being shredded.
Ravena said the shreds would be turned over to a cement manufacturing company that have expressed interest to use then as alternative fuel in its cement manufacturing plant.
The shredding is being done at the city government’s Materials Recovery Facility in Barangay Calajunan, Mandurriao district.
The cement manufacturing company will barter the shredded campaign materials with cement that the city government could use for whatever purpose that may serve the city best.
On the other hand, campaign materials that are not soiled would be made into bags, said Ravena.
In fact today, he said, there’s a scheduled meeting with the Uswag Calajunan Livelihood Association, a group of waste pickers that will do the sewing.
A zero waste advocacy organization recently pitched for the safe reusing and repurposing of campaign materials to conserve resources and minimize the volume of post-election garbage to be disposed of.
The EcoWaste Coalition appealed to both winning and losing candidates to take the lead in preventing campaign materials from being thrown in landfills, burned in cement kilns and incinerators or dumped in the oceans.
“Regardless of your poll standing, we appeal to all candidates to exemplify your concern for Mother Earth and for public welfare by finding ways to prevent your publicity materials from ending up in waste dumps and furnaces and, God forbid, the oceans,” said Aileen Lucero, national coordinator, EcoWaste Coalition.
“Dumping and burning campaign materials will be a huge waste of resources, including energy, consumed in making the seemingly incalculable number of posters, leaflets and other popular paraphernalia used for the May 2022 national and local polls,” she said. “It will further result in environmental pollution.”
While reusing and repurposing is surely not a perfect solution, especially for campaign materials laden with harmful chemicals, it will no doubt lessen the volume of trash that is collected and hauled to disposal facilities, or get spilled into the natural environment, including water bodies, Lucero said.
In addition to decreased garbage volume, reusing and repurposing campaign materials will reduce disposal costs, prevent releases of chemical pollutants into the environment, conserve resources and instill environmental awareness and responsibility among people, she added./PN