PH to send back trash shipped from SoKor next week

The garbage from South Korea, according to the DENR, contained used dextrose tubes, used diapers, batteries, bulbs, and electronic equipment. (File Photo by Bas Emmen/Unsplash)

Stuck in the Philippines for five months, the tons of mixed wastes shipped to the country last year will be returned to South Korea next week, an official of Bureau of Customs (BOC) said on Wednesday, January 2.

“We expect the 51 garbage-filled containers stored at MICT (Mindanao International Container Terminal) to be homebound by January 9 provided that all regulatory requirements are readily available,” John Simon, a port collector at the MICT, announced in a joint press conference by the BOC and the EcoWaste Coalition.

“Their expedited re-export is what BOC wants and this is what our people are yearning for,” he added.

Simon stressed that the 51 containers will be repatriated to its point of origin because the consignee of the shipment, Verde Soko Philippines Industrial Corporation, was not able secure an import permit from the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) and that the garbage shipment was also misdeclared as “plastic synthetic flakes.”

Onboard MV Affluent Ocean, the garbage shipped from South Korea arrived at the MCT in Misamis Oriental in July 2018.

The Korean garbage, according to the DENR, contained used dextrose tubes, used diapers, batteries, bulbs, and electronic equipment.

“We look ahead to the imminent return of the Korean mixed garbage shipments to their source, and to the adoption of stringent policies to prevent their recurrence, including a crackdown on the importation of plastic waste,” Aileen Lucero, EcoWaste Coalition’s National Coordinator, meanwhile said.

“We need to act decisively to protect our country from turning into a global dump for plastics and other wastes that China no longer wants,” she added.

China earlier announced that it will no longer accept wastes from other countries starting in January 2019 to “protect” its environment and its people’s health.

Due to this, the Ecowasate Coalition feared that plastic waste from various nations will be dumped to “low- and middle-income” countries like the Philippines “in the guise of recycling.

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Last November, the Embassy of Korea in the Philippines said it will take measures to have the wastes be brought back to their country “as soon as possible.”

It added that Korea’s Ministry of Environment and its Customs Service had conducted a joint investigation on the exporter of the waste located in Pyeongtaek city in South Korea and said the exporter “made export declaration on waste synthetic highly polymerized compound” last January 2018.

But the investigators found plastic wastes mixed with alien materials like waste woods or metals in the exporter’s business site that did not go through a proper recycling process.

[READ: Trash shipped from SoKor to be taken out of PH]

Apart from the trash from South Korea, it was also between 2013 to 2014 when about 103 container vans containing wastes like plastic bottles, plastic bags, newspapers, household garbage, and used adult diapers, were brought to the Philippines from the Canadian soil.