The cost of clean air
Manila Times
The Philippine government has been losing around $2 million annually since 2002 and will stand to lose more until 2014 if it continues to pay for the 26 discarded incinerators that were supposed to be used to dispose of the country’s hospital wastes. Environmental groups and advocates against debt servicing called on both the Philippine and Austrian governments to annul this “toxic” debt amounting to P503,647,200. The Ecological Waste Coalition of the Philippines (EcoWaste), Health Care Without Harm (HCWH), Greenpeace Southeast Asia and the Freedom from Debt Coalition (FDC) said the loan, worth half a billion pesos of incinerators for 26 public hospitals to “help” in the proper disposal of medical wastes, was illegitimate and a waste of money.
The loan, contracted by the Department of Finance in 1997 with Bank Austria, was aimed to finance a project to establish waste disposal facilities for hospitals run by the Department of Health (DOH). Incinerators called the Multizon, manufactured by Liechtenstein-based Hoval, were the main component of the loan. These were supplied to the DOH by Austrian firm VAMED. The Clean Air Act passed in 1999, however, imposed a ban on incinerators effective 2003.
Payments to the Hoval loan this year already constitute one-fourth of the health department’s budget for infrastructure, and are almost equal to what it will spend for both local health programs and the prevention of emerging diseases. (See table above)
“Is it not gut-wrenching to be paying for these incinerators when we know that the Department of Health is short of funds for nonburn treatment technologies for decontaminating infectious or pathological wastes that will not endanger hospital staff and host community with dioxin and other harmful emissions?” asked Manny Calonzo, secretary of EcoWaste Coalition.
The incinerators, which Greenpeace Southeast Asia claimed were substandard and did not meet the emission levels guaranteed by the supplier, had all been retired in 2003, when the incineration ban promulgated by the Philippine Clean Air Act of 1999 (CAA) took effect and when the DOH failed in its attempt to exempt them from the ban. They were part of the DOH’s project dubbed “The Austrian Project for the Establishment of Waste Disposal Facilities and Upgrading of the Medical Equipment Standard in DOH Hospitals.”
Health Care Without Harm, on the other hand, declared: “As part of Austrian Official Development Assistance (ODA), the project’s purpose had the lofty goal of helping Philippine hospitals safely dispose of medical wastes. But instead of helping, the ODA just exacerbated the problem. In the joint Department of Health (DOH)-World Health Organization (WHO) emission test conducted on one of the incinerators, the dioxin emission was a whopping 870 times over the limit set by the CAA. Now, we not only have a medical waste problem, we have an illegitimate debt that needs to be paid.”
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