Pro-environmental group EcoWaste Coalition (EWC) has appealed to the Commission on Elections (Comelec) to recycle defective ballots for May 9 polls instead of burning them.
This, after the Comelec told the House committee on suffrage and electoral reforms that the 105,853 defective ballots “will be presented to the public, accounted for individually with proper data and burned in front of all the political parties, the candidates and their representatives.”
“We appeal to our poll authorities to reconsider their plan to burn the defective ballots, which can be safely recycled instead,” EWC Zero Waste Campaigner Jove Benosa said on Tuesday, March 22.
Benosa added that burning the flawed ballots will not only turn recyclable paper into ash and generate health-damaging pollutants.
Whether the substandard ballots are burned in the open or an incinerator, the EWC warned that the move might result in the emission of pollutants, including greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and persistent organic pollutants (POPs) like dioxins.
“The Comelec can borrow shredding machines from government offices and pay a team of informal waste workers for the job of cutting the defective ballots into strips. Alternatively, it can store the defective ballots in a secure warehouse, lock them up and have them collected for recycling after the polls,” Benosa said.
He reminded the agency that Republic Act (RA) 9003, or the Ecological Solid Waste Management Act, prohibits open burning. Moreover, the RA 8749, or the Clean Air Act, prohibits municipal, biomedical, and hazardous waste incineration, which might result in the emission of poisonous and toxic fumes.
“Election stakeholders will surely support a non-polluting way of dealing with the faulty ballots while conserving paper, a valuable resource that comes from trees. Burning paper waste when the same can be recycled is not an environmentally sound option at all in the face of the global climate crisis,” Benosa said.