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After helping my sister make one as a class project, my mother continued making throw pillows stuffed with washed and dried out cellophane bags. And no, she wasn’t thinking of saving the planet. She was simply scrimping and trying to get rid of more dirt.
For people in those days, environmental problems meant having unsightly litter in the backyard. They were more concerned with visible clutter in their turf rather than the invisible effect of non-biodegradable refuse breaking the food chain or polluting rivers and sea.
Village leaders calling on residents to keep their surroundings “clean and green” did not think of preemptive flood control or “zero-waste management.” They had in mind the Imeldific civic virtue of community beautification.
Indeed, we live in a neighborhood that later would be renamed Imelda Village, after the First Lady visited the place and promised to turn it into one of her “model communities”. Shortly after that, truckloads of instant noodles arrived and were given free to those who took part in the daily clean up drive.
We also live near the river and thus were partly to blame for its demise. Our part of the river is close to where it meets the sea, so it is home to fish and clams that thrive both in fresh and salty water. The river banks used to be lined with mangroves that sheltered nests of local kingfishers, herons, and other birds.
Today, shanties on stilts have eaten up the banks, turning the river into a huge toilet and dumpsite. People are only reminded of its might during a hard rain, when it turns instantly into an ocean of filth.
So far, flashfloods in our place have not yet reached the deadly proportion experienced by people in Ormoc, Ginsaugon, and recently, Manila and Luzon. But our neighbors do not seem alarmed. They continue to dump garbage into the river.
Thus rather than spend her retirement watching TV soaps and answering sudoku puzzles, my mother is back to mobilizing other mothers in our neighborhood. This time, it’s not in support of some politicians, although she goes around approaching them for donations for their recent project, which is to gather as many soft plastic bags as possible to be used as stuffing for throw pillows.
To encourage her colleagues to collect more discarded plastic bags, she thought of rewarding those who can reach the quota with a new pillow cover, which they themselves make using cloth bought from donated funds.
That may not seem much but think of how many plastic bags would have gone to clog the canals, sink into the riverbed, or float into the sea where they would likely end up as dinner for unlucky fish, dolphins or whales.
Yes, even the biggest animal is no match for the small, thin, almost invisible plastic bag. One unfortunate whale was found dead in Manila Bay recently. Autopsy revealed plastic bags and other floating debris found in the intestines must have killed the gigantic animal.
The beached whale must have been a God-sent reminder, especially to residents in Manila who had just experienced the ordeal of flashfloods, of the second law of ecology which states that “everything must go somewhere.” What we throw away goes back to us in a different if deadly form.
It would still be long before we can follow the example set by an even poorer country like Bangladesh, which banned plastic shopping bags after the country experienced flashfloods that killed thousands of residents.
My mother opts not to wait for legislation that will usually come too late. She wants to get things done, with the help of friends, of course. Right now, she’s thinking of starting a waste segregation program and a communal compost pit.
But as a card-holding senior citizen, my mother prefers to perform civic duty in a more relaxed fashion. With her pillows stuffed with recycled plastic bags, she proposes a more laidback approach to the problem of garbage: sleep on it.
