The future of democracy is in the trash.
And that’s progress.
The essence of democracy is not elections — which produce oligarchs and conflict — but, rather, self-government to solve community problems. And there may be no greater democratic platform than waste management for boosting community problem-solving, deliberation, civic technology, and engagement between everyday people and their governments.
Waste self-government might be strongest in the barangays, or urban neighborhoods, of the Philippines. You can see one award-winning, democratic approach to trash in Lipa, 90 minutes south of Manila.
A decade ago, Lipa struggled with trash in streets, lots, and landscapes. National health authorities cited the filth as a contributor to the city’s
relatively high rates of dengue fever. Lipa had expensive contracts with a third-party, private waste company. But city officials noticed that nearby rural communities, which handled their own trash pickup in informal networks, were often cleaner.
So, the city government decided to let each of Lipa’s 72 barangays organize its own trash pick-up. To incentivize this local work, the city compensated individual residents and neighborhoods for the trash that they collected, separated, and transported to designated city locations and local companies.
Neighborhoods soon organized residents to do the collection work. In most cases, individual residents brought trash to designated locations on community-determined schedules, where volunteers separated it into recyclable and residual waste. Then the vehicles of residents or local businesses would carry waste to the recycling companies that paid the most for it.
Compensation was not always in cash. People took residual trash to the Republic Cement and Building Materials company, which paid them with bags of cement that were useful for home or neighborhood construction. In cooperation with the city, Lipa residents devised a credit-for-garbage points system that they used to buy appliances, cellphones, or laptops.
Lipa’s program won the city a top democracy award from the International Observatory on Participatory Democracy. (I met Lipa residents at an IOPD event.)
Lipa is hardly the only place of innovation. Brazil and Colombia are known for local waste-picker cooperatives, governed democratically by participants. Indonesian cities have pioneered the Bank Sampah (waste bank) concept, where residents receive payments to individual savings accounts based on the weight of the trash they turn in.
Governments encourage such programs for three big reasons. First, China’s 2018 decision to stop accepting waste from outside the country’s borders has forced more communities to handle their own trash. Second, national governments, beset by political conflict, are providing less support for local-level services. Finally, trash self-governance is seen as an anti-corruption measure, allowing everyday people to replace waste-hauling contractors who can have ties to organized crime.
While trash democracy is appearing worldwide, but local governments in the Philippines have pursued it with particular fervor, making adjustments through ups and downs.
At a recent municipal conference, I met Mayor Faustino “Inno” Dy V, president of the Philippines’ league of municipalities. Last year, he was elected mayor of Echague, a city of 91,000 in the province of Isabela.
Dy said that, despite the successes in other Philippine municipalities, his city had struggled to sustain community participation in recycling. So, he added a decentralized, community-based market system called Bigas Palit Basura, or Recyclables for Rice.
Echague residents exchange sorted recyclables — such as plastic bottles, glass, and cardboard — for a corresponding allocation of rice. Mayor Dy argued that Recyclables for Rice addresses food security and inflation by providing a staple food to families, and puts a tangible economic value on recyclable waste.
To improve the program, Echague recently expanded its reach into local public schools via a recycling competition. Students have become primary collectors of recyclables as they compete for collection points.
Through the municipal league, Dy is now preparing to take the program nationwide.
“May pera sa basura” is now a popular Filipino phrase meaning “there is cash in the trash.” There’s democracy in trash, too.
Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square and is founder-publisher of Democracy Local, a planetary publication.
This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: Democracy is in the trash, and that's a good thing | Mathews
