A non-profit group advocating the safe management of used fluorescent lamps containing toxic mercury urged the Department of Energy to put to use a costly recycling machine gathering dust in Taguig City.
Through a letter sent to Secretary Alfonso Cusi, the EcoWaste Coalition pressed for the operation of the Lamp Waste Management Facility (LWMF) with mercury recovery that the DoE bought in 2013 from MRT System International, a Swedish company, for $1.37 million, inclusive of taxes and customs duties.
The facility is a component of the DoE-led Philippine Energy Efficiency Project supported by a loan from the Asian Development Bank.
“We hope that your office is one with us in recognizing the urgent need for the government to operate the LWMF and implement a practical system for the safe recycling of lamp waste to minimize mercury pollution due to the improper disposal of fluorescent lamps at the end of their useful life,” wrote Noli Abinales, EcoWaste Coalition president.
“The prolonged non-operation of the facility can take its toll on the multimillion-peso equipment while spent lamps continue to be arbitrarily disposed of like ordinary trash, contaminating human bodies and the environment with toxic mercury,” Abinales pointed out.
The DoE operated the facility, located in Bagumbayan, Taguig City, during the pilot phase.
As described by the DOE, the LWMF is “a facility where all spent mercury-containing lamps shall undergo recycling to recover mercury and other by-products (to) avert residual mercury from entering the food chain through landfill leaching into ground water.”
When the group visited the LWMF in September 2014, they were told that the facility should be running by December 2014.
“We are now more than half-way to 2017 and we still see no functional facility that will safely receive and recycle our mercury-containing lamp waste,” said Abinales.
In the same letter, the Eco Waste Coalition urged Cusi to issue a ertificate of concurrence to the government’s ratification of the Minamata Convention on Mercury and to transmit the same to the Department of Environment and Natural Resources.
Signed by former DENR secretary Ramon Paje in October 2013 at a diplomatic conference in Japan, the Minamata Convention seeks to protect human health and the environment by reducing mercury supply and trade, phasing out or phasing down mercury-containing products and by controlling mercury emissions and releases.
The Philippines has yet to ratify the Minamata Convention.