OLONGAPO City—A riverside community here has developed the habit of turning household discards into cereal to augment the family’s food supply.
The waste-to-rice setup, dubbed Walang Plastikan, Palit Bigas Agad,” was being spearheaded by barangay Mabayuan under the stewardship of chairman Edwin Esposo.
Every Saturday, residents line up at the barangay’s redemption center to turn in their collected plastic bottles in exchange for rice. Two kilos of plastic bottles is equivalent to one kilo of rice, in the process promoting environmental sanitation and bringing more food to the table.
Rice was chosen over cash to ensure that whatever is redeemed goes directly to the table for family nourishment. After three weeks, the program mustered some 40 kilos of plastic bottles.
“We are currently accepting 1.5, 5, and 8 liter PET bottles. We reuse them as pots for our village vegetable garden. Once we get our machines, all types of plastics will be accepted,” Esposo explained.
The ‘Walang Plastikan’ program also anchors the village’s broader livelihood plan. The collected plastic bottles, according to barangay secretary Raquel de Guia, are sorted out, shredded, and recycled for various projects, including community gardens planted with peppers and eggplants, and eventually, as a raw material for the production of hollow blocks.
The project site sits on a borrowed 800-square-meter lot and needs a pulverizer and shredding machines to sustain the initiative.
The local village council allocated P200,000 initial capital for the project/
Barangay leaders also saw the program as a way to empower residents and reduce dependency on aid.
“Trash clogs our drainage system, pushing rainwater into the streets and our homes. So we want them collected as soon as possible,” Esposo stressed, adding many residents now collect the bottles, instead of throwing them away.
Mabayuan is a flood-prone area, and clogged canals have long been a problem. “We need to do something. We remove a lot of plastics, together with sachets for shampoo, conditioner, and soap, from our canals whenever heavy rains come,” Esposo said.
