Amid reports the Philippine government is scouting for sites to dump waste from Canada, a Metro Manila suburb is rushing legislation to ensure that the consignment is not left in its backyard.
A measure put forward before the city council of suburban Quezon City by Councillor Dorothy Delarmente, “expresses strong disapproval against any plan to dispose foreign waste at the Payatas Sanitary Landfill.”
The Payatas Landfill is located in suburban Quezon City, close to highly populated areas.
The shipment comprises 55 containers of illegal waste imports consigned to Chronic Plastics based in Valenzuela City and another 48 containers consigned to Live Green Enterprises in Pampanga province.
The first batch of the containers loaded with the trash arrived in the country in August 2013.
Although the location had been utilised as a trash dump for years, its use had been largely confined to Quezon City.
Earlier, the Department of Environment and Natural Resources moved to allow hundreds of tons of refuse from Canada — mainly comprising of a total 103 container loads of plastic materials — to be dumped in the country after the shipment had been abandoned by its Philippine consignees at the Port of Manila.
The off-loading of the plastic waste shipment had initially been permitted by the provincial government of Tarlac in Central Luzon. However, after local officials adopted a board resolution, further dumping was banned.
This left the government in a quandary over where to offload the trash, some of which according to the environment watchdog EcoWaste Coalition, is toxic.
The Bureau of Customs, which has custody of the shipment, had approached the Bulacan provincial government so that the waste could be dumped in the province, but Governor Wilhelmino Sy-Alvarado on July 24, 2015, stated that the provincial government would also not allow Canada’s garbage to be disposed in landfills as “this would be a health risk.”
“If other places did not accept it, the province of Bulacan will not accept it too,” Alvarado said.
Now, the environment department wants Quezon City to take the trash.
“Whether hazardous or not, as some quarters would claim, the controversial garbage would not qualify as ‘municipal waste’ because it’s not locally generated,” Delarmente, a medical doctor said in a resolution before the Quezon City council. 
The Canadian Embassy said it had nothing to do with the shipment. Its Ambassador Neil Reeder said the presence of the plastic waste in the Philippines was the result of a business transaction between Chronic Plastics and Live Green with local consignees.
Aileen Lucero, EcoWaste coordinator said they are now appealing to the Quezon City government to take a firm stand on the issue.
“Like the Tarlac Provincial Board, we appeal to the Quezon City Council to take a patriotic and precautionary stand against foreign waste dumping in Payatas and the Philippines for that matter,” Lucero stated.
Filipino legislators like Senator Miriam Defensor-Santiago said the move by the consignees to dump the wastes in the Philippines violates the Basel Convention on the transit of toxic waste materials.
EcoWaste said if the container shipments were allowed to be dumped in the Philippines, what will stop other countries from taking similar actions.