Manila: San Jose de Buenavista This capital town of Antique is expanding its existing sanitary landfill to accommodate more garbage, with a PHP50 million funding from the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR). San Jose de Buenavista Municipal Environment and Natural Resources Officer Jollyroy Amaran said in an interview on Thursday that they are in the process of procuring a four-hectare area adjacent to the existing landfill in Barangay Pantao for the construction of an additional cell for residual wastes. The expansion work is expected to start by August or the succeeding month.

According to Philippines News Agency, the DENR has allocated PHP50 million for the lot procurement and expansion of the sanitary landfill. The sanitary landfill was constructed in 2020 and became operational the following year. Currently, it is nearly filled to the brim due to the lax implementation of segregation at source. It was supposed to accommodate residual wastes only.

Amaran mentioned that they keep on reminding households and establishments to segregate through their materials recovery facility. The municipality used to generate about six tons of solid waste per day, but was reduced by around two tons because of their recent policy not to collect unsegregated waste. "Unsegregated wastes will not be collected by our garbage collectors," he said.