The Philippine government tries to do their best to handle garbage properly. Many cities and municipalities have implemented garbage collection.
There are also lots of private people who are collecting garbage and try to earn some money with it.
They mostly collect plastics (pet bottles and other plastic materials), scrap metal, old papers and cardboard, glass bottles and other recyclable materials. They usually bring them to junk shops. Junk shops are mostly small businesses who are buying these materials, sort them out and sell them to factories for recycling.
It is giving an income to the people collecting all the garbage. You can see them; man, women, and children in the streets collecting the plastic bottles and other stuff worth collecting, putting in old rice bags or carts or bicycles with side car.
Especially after typhoon disasters like Ondoy and Pepeng a lot of those materials are spread all over the streets and the collectors are very busy collecting them to earn some extra money. Aside from the earnings those collectors have made, it also helped the authorities to clean up the streets.
Junk shops are loaded with materials these days. Even today, several weeks after the disasters they are still loaded and are buying more every day.
Filipino time:
Hi Jan,nice article,it reminds me of the city I worked in back in Illinois in the States. Homeless people would wander the streets with shopping carts collecting plastic,aluminum cans, and whatever else they could to make a little cash. I don’t think our little island of Guimaras will ever have any regular garbage collection, we burn ours in the backyard, but then again, ouor backyard is literally on the edge of a jungle!
Hi Dave,
All over the world you will find this kind of people. It’s only in poorer countries like the Philippines with a high unemployment rate, that people are trying to get some money somewhere. This collecting of scrap materials is one way to earn a little to buy food for their family.