Clean and Green Las Pinas: Household Waste Segregation, Arm Chair Made From Plastic and Vermiculture

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Plastic bottles, plastic containers, candy wrappers, junk food wrappers, food leftovers and scraps. Did you know that these trash items make a difference in Las Pinas City?

Sando bags, food packaging, garbage bags, plastic straws, cellophane, plastic bags, junk food plastic, candy wrappers, shampoo sachets, coffee and milk sachets. The mentioned items seem like garbage right? The answer is no. Yes that is right, these items are not garbage. These items are actually collected by the Villar SIPAG workers in order to help with the Household Waste Segregation Program. What is the Household Waste Segregation Program? To simply define it, it is simply segregating biodegradable waste from non-biodegradable waste. This practice tremendously reduces solid waste that goes to landfills, and helps in the recycling process as well.

When Senator Cynthia Villar launched this campaign and project, it was met with opposition. To encourage participation, the Congresswoman Villar dangled the incentive of investing in the rotary composter and the building to house the composting facility if the homeowner’s association or barangay would counterpart a suitable lot of around 36 square meters.

According to the Villar SIPAG website, out of the twenty-barangay leaders in Las Pinas, five leaders readily committed themselves to the program. Seventy-five percent (75%) of the leaders did not want to join. Hence, the Household Waste Segregation Program was born. From this segregation, the biodegradable waste would be turned into compost and as a result, the waste management, rotary composting and vermicomposting livelihood projects were born.

We, the Sulyap team, were completely dumbfounded when we first heard of vermicomposting. We are going to be honest, we did have to google search what vermicomposting was when we were doing our fieldwork.

The big question is, what is vermiculture?

This is where the collected food scraps, yard trimmings, and dead branches go. Vermicomposting is the use of worms as a composting method to produce vermicompost. Worms are used used to manage agricultural wastes. The worms convert waste into worm manure (also known as worm castings), a nutrient-rich, biologically beneficial soil product. To be frank, vermicomposting is the process of using worms to process organic waste into nutrient-rich soil.

The food scraps, yard trimmings and dead branches are collected separately and brought to the vermi composting facilities, where the collected items are used to make nutrient rich soil through worms. The production of organic fertilizer through vermicomposting is now carried out in eleven (11) centers in eleven (11) barangays, with a total monthly production of 5,500 kilos or 6.1 tons . The end product is distributed to farmers all around the Philippines, ultimately helping our agricultural industry.

Now, going back to the plastic items that Villar SIPAG workers collect. Villar SIPAG collects items such as:

1. Sando bags

2. Food packaging

3. Garbage bags

4. Plastic straws

5. Cellophane

6. Plastic bags

7. Junk food plastic

8. Candy wrappers

9. Shampoo sachets

10. Coffee and milk sachets

These all go to the Villar SIPAG Plastic Waste Recycling Facility, a facility where they make these collected plastic items into school chairs. Yes they do make chairs out of these plastic items. This is another project of the Villar SIPAG that aims to reduce the amount of solid waste going to our landfills, fueled by Senator Cynthia Villar’s love for recycling.

These items are collected by Villar SIPAG Workers lovingly called “bio men”. If you are a resident of BF Resort Village, then you probably have seen workers in orange shirts that drive bicycles with a side cart. These workers collect the items that have been mentioned above in order to make the school arm chairs. Dear Las Pineros, let us help this project by segregating our garbage in order to help Las Pinas be a clean and green city, promoting recycling and reusing. An hour of segregating means more fertilizer for our farmers and more school chairs to those schools who need them.

For those who are interested in availing an armchair for your school, you just need to donate a required number of kilograms of trash to Villar SIPAG in order to get a chair. You can contact Villar SIPAG through the following contact details: Villar SIPAG - C5 Extension Road, Pulanglupa Uno, Las Piñas City, Philippines 1740. Tel. No. (632) 551-1871. Email: villar_sipag@yahoo.com.ph.

DID YOU KNOW: There is a protected environmental area in Las Pinas and Paranaque City? It is called the Las Pinas - Paranaque Critical Habitat and Eco-Tourism Area. (LPPCHEA) that will soon feature an educational park called the Las Pinas Paranaque Wetland Park.