MANILA BULLETIN
By ELLALYN B. DE VERA
October 9, 2010, 6:40pm
MANILA, Philippines — Green advocates trooped on Saturday to a public market in Caloocan City to appeal to the consumers to use the native bag or “bayong” as a “weapon” to fight the adverse effects of global warming in the country.
As part of the global day of action on climate solutions, members of the Ecology Ministry of the Diocese of Caloocan, Ecological Waste Coalition (EcoWaste), and Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives gathered at Langaray Public Market in Caloocan City to rally citizens to rediscover the use of environmentally-friendly “bayong.”
EcoWaste said “bayong,” a hand-woven native bag made of buri palm leaves or other locally available plant materials, should be considered as the “ecological weapon of choice” by Filipino consumers.
Government data indicate that plastic comprises 15 percent of Metro Manila’s solid wastes, with food and kitchen wastes accounting for about 45 percent, paper 16 percent, glass and wood 9 percent and other discards 15 percent.
According to the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, some 756,986 kilos of garbage were collected during the coastal cleanup operations in 2009 with plastic bags constituting 300,176 kilos or almost half of the retrieved garbage from shorelines and waterways.
“We can break our obsession with plastic bags by switching to the ever versatile ‘bayong’ that our elders were accustomed to before our society fell in love with anything convenient and disposable to the detriment of our fragile environment,” Romy Hidalgo of EcoWaste said.
“Let the bayong be our ecological weapon of choice as citizens, while we ask our political leaders to initiate even bolder measures, globally and locally, to fight climate change,” he added.
Caloocan Bishop Deogracias S. Iñiguez Jr. commended the Langaray market vendors for heeding the call for ecological stewardship by encouraging consumers to drop the ubiquitous plastic bags.
The bishop referred to the move by the Samahang Pagkakaisang mga Tindera sa Talipapa (SPTT) to observe every Monday beginning this Sunday, October 11 as “No Plastic Bag Day” to cut unrestrained consumption and disposal of plastic bags.
http://www.mb.com.ph/node/281326/bayong-ecoweapon-urged
