In a recent pronouncement, Atienza threatened to file charges against local officials of Angono town in Rizal for allegedly using the shoreline of Laguna de Bay, the country’s biggest lake, as an open dumpsite.

Atienza is very much in the right, assuming his facts are correct. R.A. 9003 or the Ecological Sold Waste Management Act does mandate the closure of all open dumpsites in the country. And, the deadline for that has long passed. And if the law is to be implemented, then Atienza had better start filing those criminal and administrative cases.

But the problem with R.A. 9003 is that it mandates the unachievable with utter disregard for reality. The law requires that all cities and municipalities dispose of their garbage at sanitary landfill standards. That is a laudable objective but one, however, that requires a lot of money to achieve and is well beyond the budgetary capabilities of most local government units (LGUs).

Back when the Metro Manila Development Authority was operating an honest-to-goodness landfill, waste disposal costs were already at almost US$20 per ton. But the agency was able to capitalize on the economies of scale since it handles most of Metro Manila’s daily waste output. But that is not even mentioning the cost of acquiring and building all the safeguards needed to operate the facility. Definitely, this has gone up as we have entered the era of P35 per kilo rice and premium gasoline at almost P50 per liter.

To be blunt about it, there are very few LGUs in the country that can afford sanitary landfill-level disposal costs even at US$20 per ton. And, even fewer mayors who in their right mind will voluntarily comply with this requirement. Not if it means robbing other equally important basic services of funding.

Atienza admitted as much when he expressed the DENR’s willingness "to provide technical assistance in addressing (Angono’s) solid waste problem." "Technical assistance" is not the same as subsidizing the construction and operation of a genuine sanitary landfill. There is also the added financial burden of actually collecting the garbage from the households and hauling it to the final disposal site.

The case of Angono, a legitimate first-class municipality, is not unique. Things are definitely worse in the vast majority of the LGUs in the country, particularly those classified as fourth, fifth, and sixth class municipalities. Proper garbage disposal, for these LGUs, will always be a low priority since their annual incomes just run into a few million pesos and they are highly dependent on their Internal Revenue Allotments.

If the spirit of R.A. No. 9003 is to be faithfully applied, lawyering will be the next growth industry in the country since almost every city and municipal official will be in the firing line of the DENR. Charging the local officials of Angono will open the flood gates to a slew of cases since the dictum is that everyone deserves the same treatment under the law and there is no room for selective prosecution.