MANILA – President Rodrigo Duterte has urged Western countries to cease from shipping their garbage to developing Asian countries.
According to Duterte, the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia have become dumping grounds for hazardous trash from Western countries.
“If we are talking about improving the ecology of the place, the environment, then we must take into account what we dump,” Duterte said during the Special Lunch on Sustainable Development at the 35th Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Summit in Thailand on Monday.
The President suggested that regular meetings should be conducted to discourage Western countries from shipping their garbage to Asia.
“I think, Mr. Chair, this is as good as any other time and any place to tell the other countries, the Western countries, to be more circumspect,” he added.
Earlier this year, Duterte forced Canada to take back 69 containers of trash exported to the country during the previous administration ending the years-long diplomatic row with the Canadians.
In December 2018, South Korea agreed that it will shoulder the shipping cost to take back 6,500 tons of waste that it had originally dumped in the Philippines.
“When I was told that this garbage has been sent to us by some countries, I ordered immediately that they’d be shipped out on the first ship going to the North American continent. And I told them that if they do not accept their garbage, then you just drop the container near their ports,” Duterte said./PN
