Federico Segarra |
Manila (EFE) a third of the plastics that float in the oceans of our planet.
This devastating data makes the Asian archipelago the largest contributor to plastic pollution in the seas globally, with more than 356,000 metric tons of plastic dumped into the ocean, 35.1 percent of the total, followed very far by India ( 126,513) and Malaysia (73,098), according to a study in the journal Science published in 2021.
Among the top ten countries that pollute the sea with plastic the most, there is only one non-Asian, Brazil, in seventh place while the rest of the list of the ten most polluting countries complete it, in this order, China, Indonesia, Burma, Vietnam, Bangladesh and Thailand.
The populations of Asian countries throw 836,488 metric tons of plastic into the sea every year, 82.6 percent of what is dumped in the world, with the Philippines as the most polluting country far behind the others: each Filipino dumps more than 3 3 kilos of plastic per year, 3,000 times more than in Spain and 20 times more than in China (170 grams).
Manila Bay, on whose beaches no one has dared to bathe for decades because it is one of the areas with the most plastic pollution in the world, symbolizes this problem that is due to political, socioeconomic and commercial reasons.
“The contamination of our seas and rivers with plastic waste in a national emergency. The Government considers it a serious problem, but the necessary funds to implement suitable recycling programs, nor the optimal infrastructure, do not arrive, ”says Dr. Irene Rodriguez, an environmental expert from the prestigious University of the Philippines, to EFE.
large polluting companies
Among the most important factors is the “sachet economy”, as it is known in the Philippines, the custom of Filipinos to buy products such as shampoo, toothpaste, cosmetics or food in small plastic envelopes for individual use.
The Asian archipelago was one of the countries where large multinational companies experimented with single-person doses of cosmetic and cleaning products (“sachets”), due to the need to adapt eminently consumer habits to the precarious domestic economy of the middle class and Filipina worker.
A 2019 Global Alliance for Incineration Alternatives report identified Nestlé and Unilever as the top two companies contributing to plastic pollution in the Philippines.
51 percent of the emission of plastics into the ocean in the Philippines is fed by this type of product, according to Science. “The ambition to maintain the corporate benefits of these business giants” and the “pressure” that these groups exert on the authorities prevents the laws to stop the commercialization of these products from being properly implemented.
According to Science, there is another main explanatory factor why the Philippines stands out superlatively from the rest of the countries in terms of plastic pollution of the seas: the pollution of its rivers and streams, through which all the plastic discarded in urban and rural inhabited areas travels. irremediably until it empties into the ocean.
Although in China, whose vast territory vastly exceeds the set of islands that make up the Philippine archipelago, only 1,309 rivers flow with large amounts of plastics, 4,820 of the Philippine rivers are highly polluted.
informal settlements
For Dr. Rodriguez, the explanation lies in “the large number of informal settlements” that populate the areas adjacent to the riverbanks, which “do not have recycling or waste management systems, and where environmental education is scarce.”
“In recent years, forceful legislation has been made to curb the disposal of plastics in the Philippines, but there is no money or political will to create the necessary infrastructure” to help tackle the problem properly, concludes Rodriguez.
Marian Ledesma, an expert in waste management from Greenpeace Philippines, explained to EFE that the Asian country also “imports a large amount of plastic” from industrialized countries to later process or recycle it.
The problem, reveals Ledesma, “is that the Philippines does not have an optimal recycling and processing system and a good part of the plastic that comes from rich countries is of low quality, so this product ends up becoming waste that is discarded” and creates the tides of plastic that drift across the archipelago.