The Philippine waste export industry

We were seething when one North American economy had sealed its decaying hospital waste in huge metal containers and shipped them over to our pristine shores. Our emotions ranged from being insulted and branded an international dump to being the clueless recipient of toxic waste that absolutely had neither economic value nor any utility, save for spreading illnesses and deadly disease in an economy that could ill-afford to manufacture another calamity, much less import more from the First World. 

Our government’s protestations were mild, to say the least. Our leaders didn’t seem to care that we were being treated as the world’s toilet.

What could the Aquino administration have been thinking? Perhaps it was simply being in character. Saving the environment was not a priority. More than any dispensation before, that administration had allowed more toxic power plants to proliferate and replace cleaner fuel energy providers.

Fortunately, such limpwristed lethargic impotence should be a thing of the past with the appointment of Secretary Regina Paz L. Lopez to the Department of the Environment and Natural Resources (DENR).

To say that Secretary Lopez is dogged and driven to protect the environment is an understatement. Absolutely no one who had come before her is as uncompromising and has as profound a passion to protect Mother Earth as she does. Never mind that she might be a headstrong fundamentalist in that sense. All others had been far less dedicated, far more compromising and too willing to wheel and deal much-too-often, selling out to the highest paying bidder and polluter.

Lopez cannot be bought, and that is a rarity in government.

Recently in the Visayas, she had ordered a controversial shutdown that, when seriously analyzed, reveals possible anomalies that challenge our notions of the culpability of polluters and raises further questions that indicate to us that Lopez’s is, indeed, an inspired appointment.

Offhand, it seems that within the mining industry, the Philippines has also been embroiled in exporting waste. And exporting it profitably sans tariffs and taxes.

Note a recent report buried within the business pages of a major broadsheet. It was about halting the mopping-up operations of a firm thought to have long been shut down. To prevent further environmental degradation, the DENR stopped what was labeled as hauling and cleanup activities.

The firm was a mining company. It mined nickel laterites through open-pit operations. Albeit shut down, this bustled with a ghostly afterlife, ravaging still what it had ravaged before.

The DENR discovered that mine waste material hauled off and effectively exported to China contained such excessive amounts of soil and other economically viable metals and minerals that environmental degradation continued unabated, perhaps as profitably as before. Behind the closure order, there is amazing discernment of mining’s hidden afflictions.

Normally nickel laterites contain approximately 60-percent iron and 1-percent platinum. The balance is comprised of chromite, paladium, copper and even precious silver. Sulfide nickel ore contains 40-percent to 50-percent nickel. In both, only half of the export is actually pure nickel. The effective pricing composition is worse when soil is mixed in and the classification is labeled “waste material.” It is neither substantially nickel nor waste that is exported to China, thus the export transfer-pricing premiums benefit offshore traders and not the exporting economy.

Moreover, when classified as waste, this is valued as waste at the landed end where import tariffs and duties should be levied. This then bloats margins when other metals and minerals are extracted as waste and actually enter duty-free.

Not only does insidious greed take over but so does environmental irresponsibility continue and perpetuate. While the mining company pays a pittance to the community for hauling the toxic waste material that the mine had created, the profiteering continues well beyond the life of the mine. And as the profiteering perpetuates, so does environmental degradation.