Positive regulatory action

The Environmental Management Bureau (EMB) in San Fernando, Philippines, is setting up checkpoints along the North Luzon Expressway and the Manila North Road (MacArthur Highway) to prevent the transport of untreated hazardous wastes from hospitals in Metro Manila to a sanitary landfill in Tarlac.

I presume that the usual controls – of guidelines, SOPs and more formal Codes of Practice, together with the various practical controls at the gate of the landfill site – have all failed. This is now positive regulatory action but equally is a last resort in regulation, to check each incoming vehicle.

The Metro Clark Waste Management Corp. (MCWMC) in Barangay Cutcut in Capas, Tarlac, is the only authorized facility in Luzon to store treated hospital wastes and other hazardous trash.

Lormelyn Claudio, director of the EMB in Central Luzon, said aside from the checkpoints, the agency is working on strengthening the multipartite monitoring team (MMT) of the MCWMC.

Based on an agreement from Tuesday’s technical conference, she said the EMB has also asked the Department of Health to monitor the operations of hospitals as generators of wastes.

Waste regulation is a sometime complex undertaking, sometimes unnecessarily so, but it has to be done. However, there is far more to it than sitting behind a desk and being important, and though the news report suggests that the Philippines regulator has previously been far from successful, this is now very positive regulatory action.

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