Really??  The collective eyebrows of members at Ecological Waste Management (Eco-Waste) Coalition rise perplexed.  Eco-Waste reminds us that landfills create enormous volumes of methane, and are thus the most significant anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.

Methane is a global warming gas that has 23 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide.  Because LFGTE systems have inbuilt inefficiencies, they fail to capture all the methane produced and do not necessarily prevent substantial discharge of methane into the atmosphere.  So how can landfill-gas-to-energy possibly be a model solution to climate change?

Running the LFGTE facility will require maintaining a certain volume of waste so the required methane output can be sustained.  This means continuous dumping of waste in ever larger quantities.  Will it now be our civic duty to keep producing garbage?  Will they pass an ordinance that will set a quota for communities, with penalty for those who fall short?  What happens if the productive use of organic wastes becomes more profitable than merely dumping them?  Will there be enough garbage then to feed the facility?  Will the Montalban Methanne Power Corporation buy all out garbage? Unlikely, di ba?  Honestly, can LFGTE technology be deemed a renewable energy source?

The LFGTE technology feeds on a wasteful pattern of disposing organic materials into dumpsites.  These organic materials could be better used by composting them into effective and safe soil nutrients that can help restore depleted farmlands.  They would also keep farmers from being dependent on chemical farm products, such as toxic fertilizers.  Dumping is both wasteful and destructive.

The Court of Appeals was swift in issuing an injunction against the implementation of Davao City's ordinance banning the aerial  spraying of pesticides on banana plantations and on people because the banana plantation owners were so inconvenienced by that ban which the communities adversely affected by the spraying had earlier successfully asked City Hall for.

So, while the Appellate Court deliberated on whether the Davao Regional Trial Court had really erred in upholding the city ordinance, the ban had to be ordered lifted, at least temporarily, by the CA.  The issuance of injunction had to be swift.

Meanwhile, oppositors of a then-impending massacre of trees in a "buffer zone" of the Mt. Kanlaon protected area sought a TRO from the Bacolod RTC.  The court set the hearing -- on whether or not to issue a TRO -- for about four weeks later, allegedly due to paperwork considerations, and about 2,000 trees were killed in the interim by PNOC-EDC seeking to pursue their search for a lot of hot air.  That was about half the number of trees the oppositors had wanted to save in the first place.

on the date set, what came out was an announced postponement of the hearing to early September.  Without a TRO, the steam hunters could finish off the other half.  After the trees shall have been cut, no TRO will be issued because the petition shall have become moot and academic.  Mourn the unrestorable lives of the massacred trees, and prepare to mourn our lives --- we're next.

More importantly, as the Ecological Waste Management (Eco-Waste) Coalition secretary Raul Hidalgo has warned, the collection and storage of a big volume of decaying materials, instead of this being immediately segregated at source and composted at source, runs the risk of larger amounts of methane, a greenhouse gas, being released into the atmosphere. Methane has 23 times more than the warming potential of carbon dioxide. 

The organizers of the 18-year-old Kamayan para sa Kalikasan monthly environmental forum decided to focus on this topic the forum's 222nd session, on August 15.  Invited to speak were leading resource persons from Eco-Waste, including Dr. Helen N. Mendoza and Rei Panaligan, as well as Sonia Mendoza, chair of the Mother Earth Foundation.  Also invited were Montalban Methane Power Corporation executive vice president Danilo Cantiller, and also Hanniel Fernandez of the same firm, project holder for the Montalban Landfill Methane Recovery and Electricity Generation Project, in historic Montalban town now official called Rodriguez.  Cantiller answered our invitation with regrets that he would be out of town on the forum date. The lead organizer wrote back to ask for an official handout or statement, but got no reply,

The answers from Rei Medrano, corporate social responsibility manager, were far from clear. His power-point presentation left more questions than answers.

But what was more important in the minds of most forum participants was serious concern for the fate of some 4,000 trees in a so-called "buffers" of the protected area, including centuries-old ones, and the harm the geothermal power exploration project was goint to cause on the rich biodiversity and the watershed capacity of the forest cover on that part of Mt. Kanlaon Nature Park.

Greenwatch Philippines president Don Flordeliza, representing the Save Mt. Kanlaon Coalition based in Bacolod City, said the promised planting of replacement seedlings will take much time to grow, and bio-diversity is almost totally irreplaceable.  Still, PNOC-EDC (the latter initials stand for the Lopez-owned Energy Development Corp.) still emphasizes the so-called legal bases of its haste to cut the trees.  Another speaker, Mara Pardo de Tavera, refused to go along with legal and technical discourse and chose to focus on the value of life.