MANILA, Philippines — The ship that would return tons of garbage shipped illegally to the country from South Korea is now at the Misamis Port, a lawmaker announced on Sunday.
This following the announcement of a Mindanao International Container Terminal (MICT) official that the 51 garbage-filled containers will be shipped back to Pyeongtaek City in South Korea.
The garbage, which was impounded in Misamis Oriental, was originally expected to be repatriated on January 9.
READ: Re-export of 6.5K tons of South Korea waste eyed next week
With this development, Misamis Oriental 2nd District Rep. Juliette Uy thanked the South Korean government, officials from the Bureau of Customs (BOC), the Department of Environmental and Natural Resources (DENR), the Phividec Industrial Estate Authority as well as civil society and environment groups for swiftly addressing in various ways the solid waste management controversy.
Uy, nevertheless, made clear her opposition to any move, plan, or proposal to keep the garbage and recycle it.
“All, not just part or some, of the total garbage shipments stored at MICT should be returned to South Korea. All of it. There should be no gray areas in this regard,” she said.
The BOC, according to the lawmaker, said that there are still some 5,000 metric tons of garbage to be shipped back to South Korea on or before the end of this month.
Uy also noted that she will “pursue accountability and address problems in our government policy, operations, and procedures that allow the importation of all solid wastes.”
The congresswoman then called on the BOC, DENR and Phividec “to work and cooperate with various efforts – including the upcoming congressional investigation into this issue.”
“I see the need to adopt new stringent policies to prevent the importation of plastic and other types of waste, since we do not want our province and our whole country for that matter to become a global garbage dump,” she said.
The re-exportation of the waste to South Korea was due to the failure of the consignee, Verde Soko Philippines Industrial Corp., to secure an import permit from the DENR and for its misdeclaration of the garbage shipment as “plastic synthetic flakes,” according to MICT Port Collector John Simon said in a press briefing earlier this month.
“Their expedited re-export is what BOC wants and this is what our people are yearning for,” Simon said. /je