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Make Christmas meaningful by reducing E-waste

December 21, 2014December 21, 2014 Ellen Leave a comment

This Christmas, one of the most welcome gifts is a cellphone or a Tablet. Not only for adults but also for children who are now tech-savvy.

Ban Toxics, a group that goes by the motto that “The only world worth passing to our children is toxic- free” advises all of us to go slow on new gadgets.

E-Waste. From European Commission website

Ban Toxics says Electronic Waste or E-Waste is the bane of the today’s Electronic Age. Discarded computers, office electronic equipment, entertainment device electronics, mobile phones, television sets, and refrigerators are all considered e-waste. Many of these devices contain toxic metals (lead, mercury, arsenic, cadmium, selenium) and can stream into our environment if not managed properly.

Toxic materials poison the land, the waters and the air. That is poison we imbibe.

Ban Toxics says “Toxic metals, such as mercury, bio-accumulates in living organisms and can cause neurological and respiratory problems.”

There is no turning back to the time when one can live and work without electronic equipment and gadgets. But there are ways to enjoy the convenience and efficiency of the electronic age while limiting society’s exposure to the toxic metals from e-waste materials. Here are five tips from Ban Toxics:

1.Be smart and look for greener electronics. Organisations like Greenpeace have compiled a list evaluating electronic companies’ commitment and progress on reducing their environmental footprint (www.greenpeace.org/international/en/campaigns/toxics/electronics/how-the-companies-line-up/).

You can actually buy electronic goodies with very little toxins in them. Be mindful of your purchases and look for electronics with the RoHS logo (European Union’s Restriction of Hazardous Substances, which requires electronics manufacturers to eliminate toxins in the products they sell such as lead and cadmium). Aside from the RoHS logo, look for products with the Energy Star label, J-Moss (Japan Ministerial Ordinances), and WEEE compliant logos.

2.Think twice before you throw your gadget in the bin. Properly dispose your items through DENR-registered disposal hazardous waste facilities (www.emb.gov.ph/portal/Portals/8/Documents/A4-Treater%20January%202014.pdf).

Globe Telecom acknowledges the importance of proper e-waste disposal and conducts a mobile recycling programme. They accept old phones in many of their participating stores (www.globe.com.ph/globebridgecom/project1phone). Alternatively, ask your electronics manufacturers if they have a take-back policy or trade-in programes.

3. Groups such as the Basel Action Network have established the e-Stewards Initiative an electronics waste recycling standard that hold electronics recyclers in North America to recycle locally and not export their toxic e-waste to developing countries such as the Philippines. Recycling initiatives such as these are gaining momentum. Check around your city if you have reputable recyclers that have passed similar certifications.

4. Bring life to the old by taking your faulty electronics to your local accredited electrician or service centers. The cost of getting them fixed can outweigh the cost of getting a new one. If they’re not faulty, you can still give them a new lease of life by selling them online through sites, such as olx.ph and ayosdito.ph.

5. Re-consider whether you need new gadgets. If your electronics is still within its functional capacity, the latest update might not be worth the added social and environmental cost.
Reduce risk to health by reducing E-waste. That’s the best Christmas gift you can give to yourself, your family and to the community.

Protecting El Nido’s coral reefs

June 18, 2014June 18, 2014 Ellen Leave a comment

Cadlao mountain island, the highest in El Nido.

When God blessed the earth, he must have been standing near and facing Palawan because the province is so rich in natural resources and possesses spectacular sceneries – on the ground, underground, on the water, underwater.

In the northern part of Palawan is El Nido, a municipality of almost 40,000 in an area covering 92,326 hectares. The town is named after Swiflets (local name is Balinsasayaw) nests made from the bird’s saliva found in the crevices of the limestone’s cliffs in the area.

The mountain islands of El Nido are simply breathtaking. They are towers of stone so high they almost kiss the clouds.They come in all shapes and forms, depending on your imagination.

If your tour guide is Jayson R. Gonzales of El Bacuit Travel and Tours, he will show you a mountain island shaped like a helicopter, a feature shaped like a king with a crown with a horse nearby, or a stone jutting out of the cliff shaped like the chunky heel of a shoe.

Gonzales will also point out to you Cadlao (Visayan word for laughter), the highest of El Nido’s mountain islands at 640 feet (as high as a 64-floor building). He said Cadlao is the locals’ weather barometer. “When the tip of the mountain is covered by clouds it means it will rain.”

Underwater, El Nido is also as awesome. It’s a coral reef paradise. According to El Nido Foundation Inc.(ENFI) they have identified 447 reef-building coral species in El Nido. There are 44 unconfirmed species.

El Nido Foundation Chairman Alberto Lim

ENFI, headed by former Tourism Secretary Alberto Lim as chairman of the board and lawyer businessman Charlie Yu as president, is an organization dedicated to the improvement of the quality of life in El Nido which includes sustainable utilization of the community’s natural resources.

ENFI is working closely with Green Fins,an initiative of the United Nations Environment Programme, for the protection of coral reefs in El Nido. They have just concluded an orientation of journalists on the progress of their efforts in El Nido.

Green Fins, which is coordinated internationally by Reef-World sets the standard for managing the protection of coral reefs. It provides guidance and support for business owners and national authorities to promote best practices in sustainable tourism – especially scuba diving which has become urgent in El Nido with the increase of tourist arrivals.

The importance of coral reefs cannot be overstated: Corals (which are actually animals , not plants or places ) play an essential role in everything from water filtration and fish reproduction to shore line protection and erosion prevention. It also acts as a barrier to storms and surge.

Experts said that if only there were a healthy population of coral reefs in Tacloban during supertyphoon Yolanda, the damage would not have been as calamitous as it was.

UNEP’s Jerker Tamelander leads the placement of a buoy near one of El Nido’s mountain islands.

Lim, who has been going to Palawan since the early 1980’s and co-founded Ten Knots Deelopment Corporation (now owned by Ayala Land) is concerned on the effect of increased tourist arrivals in El Nido. In 1994, recorded tourist arrivals numberd only 10,00. In 2013, more than 63,000 came to El Nido) or a jump of about 600 percent.

The usual package offered by tour operators island hopping (El Nido has a lot to offer with it placid lagoons and awesome caves. ) which includes scuba diving and snorkeling.
Saying that tourism is both an opportunity and a threat, Irma Rose Marcelo, executive director of ENFI, said some of the tourism-related activities are injurious to coral reefs are anchor damage,snorkeler and diver damage,Boat strike,pollution – solid wastes, eutrophication in ground water from towns, villages and establishments,Sediment run-offs from land clearing, overfishing, and illegal fishing. Climate change, the change of ocean’s temperature is also wreaking havoc on the coral reefs.

Even the fun practice of fish feeding by tourists. Jayson Gonzales said until he trained with ENFI and Green Fins, he didn’t know it. “I even provided bread pieces to tourists to feed the fish so they would come, he said.

Now, at the beginning of the islands tour,“Don’t feed the fish” is one of the “Do’s and Don’ts “ that he gives.

Tour guide Jayson Gonzales makes a tour of El Nido enjoyable and educational.

Feeding fish disrupts the food cycle and causes serious damage on coral reefs. In the natural underwater food cycle, fish eats algae on the coral reefs. When humans feed the fishes, they no longer eat the algae, which overgrows and suffocates the coral reef to death.

Damaged coral reefs means decreased fish production which could lead to food crisis and malnutrition of the human population.

Marcelo said a 2009 assessment of coral reef condition in El Nido showed coral cover of living hard corals averaged 26 percent which is a fair condition while soft coral cover overall was lower, averaging 4 percent.

As it take hundreds of years for a coral reef to grow, so does rehabilitation of damaged coral reefs. EENFI, which is restoring dynamite-damaged Reefs in Tres Marias islands near the West Philippine Sea, says it’s a very slow process. It takes a year to heal and restore one centimeter of coral reef.

Green Fins believes that diving and snorkeling centers are uniquely positioned to act within their own communities and among customers to encourage positive and lasting change. It’s members are expected to adhere to a Code of Conduct such as No Touching of coral reefs and not anchoring on coral reefs.

Green Fins has also come up with icons on their guidelines so that it would be understood regardless of nationalities.

ENFI’s Charlie Yu recalls the early years when they had the whole island of Shimizu to themselves when they visited Palawan. He said the island now is a favorite picnic area of tourists.

He said being a father, he wants to bequeath to his children an El Nido that may not be as spectacular as he found it but still awesome. “We are doing this for the next generation,” he said.

A lovely New Year even with Yolanda!

January 3, 2014January 3, 2014 Ellen Leave a comment

Yolanda was very much in our mind as we bid goodbye to 2013 and welcomed 2014.

Our place in Guisijan, Laua-an, Antique was one of those hit by Yolanda. Not as bad as Leyte and Samar but there was still a lot of repairing and fixing to do.

My mother’s langka tree was no match to Yolanda’s fury.

So was this mango tree at our backyard.

Chainsaw service is in demand to clear Yolanda’s ruins.

Another of Nanay’s mango trees felled by Yolanda.

We gathered the sawdust and put it in a compost pit.

What do we do with these cut tree trunks and branches?

We made some chopping blocks from felled duhat tree.

Isn’t this garden set lovely? Thanks to Yolanda.
The bromeliad survived Yolanda and as if in triumph, it bloomed.

May God’s blessings come in abundance this year we are welcoming and other years to come.

USS Guardian probe report evades key issues, raises more question

June 27, 2013June 27, 2013 Ellen Leave a comment

By Rex Robles, VERA Files

USS Guardian in Okinawa, Japan. Jan. 2013

Last week, the US Navy released the result of its investigation on the Jan. 17, 2013 grounding of USS Guardian in Tubbataha Reef in the Sulu Sea, pinning the blame on “lack of leadership” but praising the “heroic efforts of the crew to save their ship.”

One reason why the report seems superficial and incomplete is that it failed to attach true copies of essential navigational documents.

As a rule, whenever a Navy ship leaves port for any destination, the path or course it is to take to reach its destination is set down beforehand on a maritime map, commonly referred to as a chart. This is required for those navigating over water and all Navy vessels, except small boats on short trips along a coastline or a river, must perform this basic task.

The charted course is an official record of a ship’s movement and, together with the Quartermaster’s logbook that records the actual position, heading and speed of the ship at any time, will form an important part of any investigation involving that ship and its crew.

The course a voyage will take is reviewed and approved by the ship’s captain before it is implemented. Any subsequent radical deviation from the charted course will, likewise, have to be approved by him. The record of the ship’s planned movement together with the actual path to its destination is also recorded electronically, which is convenient and easy to retrieve.

When our government failed to assert its sovereign right to conduct an independent investigation of the incident, we effectively barred ourselves from gaining access to certain necessary records surrounding the incident. These records would have thrown light on many questions that the report seems to have glossed over.

According to the report, the admitted destination of the ship was Timor-Leste. There was no mention of any stopover along the way, much less any intention to enter, with permission, the highly restricted and internationally protected waters of Tubbataha. Indeed, from a navigator’s point of view, in order for the grounding to take place, the Guardian would have to stray way beyond the usual course followed by ocean-going vessels traversing the area.

How would an “error,” attributed by the report to faulty digital maps, lead the Guardian deep into restricted waters of the Sulu Sea? Apparently, this will have to remain a mystery since the Philippine government has already inhibited itself from investigating the incident.

The unanswered questions go beyond what the report covers, which seems to confine itself only to questions of adequate leadership, navigational skill and accuracy of digital nautical charts (DnC).

Okay then, let’s just ask a couple of questions that are among several that obviously need to be asked: Was it part of the mission of the Guardian to transit through restricted waters? If so, what clearance did it possess, and at what level was it granted?

The reference to “heroic efforts of the crew to save the ship” merely underlines the studious avoidance by the report from discussing the critical questions involved.

Finally, it would seem specious, at the very least, for the report to mention faulty digital maps at all. Navigational errors arising from the use of digital charts, which are based on multi-satellite projections, could not be in the order of “error” committed by the Guardian, which found itself scores of miles off course. In language surely clear to every maritime navigator, one could expect an error of “seconds to a degree,” which translates to only several hundred feet, at the most.

But the all these hanging questions will remain in the air due to our own fault. In our dealings with China, with Malaysia, and more recently with Taiwan, we have adopted a posture that many would consider timorous and tentative, but which our leaders apparently regard as subtle, sophisticated and effective.

(The author is a retired Philippine Navy commodore and currently head of RCR Consultancy, a security risk management outfit. VERA Files is put out by veteran journalists taking a deeper look at current issues. Vera is Latin for “true.”)

Trawling Tubbataha’s treasures

April 15, 2013April 15, 2013 Ellen Leave a comment

USS Guardian in Tubbataha.

By Rex Robles,VERA Files

It was 1974 and I was taking up an advanced course in Mechanical Engineering at the US Navy Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. For our final exam in Oceanography, our professor simply called the twelve of us to his office one by one and asked us a few questions. I noticed a certain level of interest in the Philippines that I did not expect.

For instance, he showed me a satellite photograph of Manila Bay and asked me what I thought about a plan to build a highway along the Manila-Cavite coastline. I mumbled some comment on how the ecology in the area would be affected.

Then he showed me photographs of the entire Sulu Sea with what looked like ridgelines in the water running roughly parallel to Palawan. I was intrigued. My professor, who is based in New Zealand, told me they were a dozen or so swells that go northwest at certain times. At other times, they go the opposite way.

The swells seemed to emanate from the Tubbataha area. I could find no natural explanation for the phenomenon and neither, it appeared, could my professor. We talked about Tubbataha having been formed from underwater volcanoes, about the effect of winds and tides, but arrived at nothing conclusive. Could the swells have come from seismic tests, as in oil exploration? But then the swells would hardly appear linear as captured by the satellite images. And they would go only one way.

The special interest in the Philippines and its underwater resources seemed even more pronounced during a class visit to Port Hueneme in California, where the US Navy ran a facility for testing certain projects, most of them top secret. As a foreign student, I was not allowed to enter the area where Polar environments were simulated, but instead was brought to a huge, air-conditioned warehouse where they kept soil samples extracted from the ocean bottom by their research vessels.

I was shown soil samples taken from the South China Sea by a government vessel, the Glomar Challenger I. At that time, the United Nations Commission on the Law of the Sea or UNCLOS was still unheard of and my hosts presumably saw nothing wrong with taking samples from what they considered then as international waters. It was surmised at that time, from the samples analyzed, that the area was rich in carbon deposits, both gas and oil.

A young US Coast Guard Officer formally opined in a term paper he submitted to our class in Maritime Law that the waters around Tubbataha were international in character, following the 12 km limit for internal waters being observed at the time. I felt compelled to submit a rebuttal pointing out that among other cases, wide portions of Hudson Bay in North America would have to be treated likewise. My rebuttal went unchallenged, and was actually cheered by the rest of the class.

The activities of Glomar Challenger in the sixties and even earlier went virtually unnoticed by the Philippine Government. Given the more than casual interest of certain sectors in the US regarding our underwater assets, isn’t it possible that they also have mapped out the sea bottom at and around Tubbataha?

My point is that in the struggle for control of prime movers such as gas and oil, national boundaries do not matter as much as actual control of these resources from inside or outside these boundaries. And where the boundaries are poorly defined, the strong and powerful will most likely enter the picture to pursue their own interests.

Which brings us to the reasons the USS Guardian came to grief on the shoals of Tubbataha. The US Government has blamed faulty charts for the grounding. Perhaps for lack of a better or more plausible explanation, though it erroneously assumes that everything else was above board.

For even the most accurate and detailed charts won’t help if you are already in the wrong place to begin with! The Officer On Watch (OOW) at that time will have to explain why the ship was where it was just before the grounding. What he did (assuming he was alone in making the decision) was like a motorist abandoning a highway to enter, in the dead of night, a dense forest clearly off limits, with no tire-tracks to follow, and with boulders to hamper his way.

The ship’s Captain also keeps a Night Order Book, where he writes down what he expects to be done during a night passage. He also approves a charted course for the ship to follow. Was the course he approved specifically set for Tubbataha? If so, why? If not, why did the OOW still head for that restricted area?

Chinese vessel in Tubbataha.

The recent case of the Chinese fishing Boat, which ran aground within sight of the Ranger Station in Tubbataha, is similarly instructive.

To begin with, it can be assumed that at least one of the crewmembers understands English (or even Tagalog!). They did not just wander deep into the Sulu Sea without such preparation. Jabbering in Chinese or playing their national anthem in response to official overtures just won’t wash. After all, they knew enough to communicate a desire to buy their way out of their predicament.

Our experience with Chinese “poachers” who intrude into our territorial waters is that they are invariably equipped with the requisite navigational and communications equipment. They can navigate well, even without the use of GPS, with their sextants complemented by tables of star elevations and coordinates (H.O. 214). They did not just make a mistake for which, therefore, they should be forgiven. They have no valid excuse for their illegal presence, and our laws should fully apply.

However, the argument put forward by a government spokesman that the difference in treatment with the Guardian case is an “apples and oranges” comparison does not hold water. The Guardian did not have the implied blanket permission to operate in Philippine waters. It had to have specific license to enter a highly restricted, “no take” area such as Tubbataha. In that sense, it is clearly in the same boat as the Chinese vessel.

The further claim that the Guardian incident was being investigated is likewise misleading since I don’t know of any Philippine effort to undertake such an inquiry. We appear to be satisfied with being merely invited to an investigation conducted by US authorities. And then, since we are dealing with the mighty United States of America, we quietly acquiesce to the findings.

Our tepid response to offenses committed by United States personnel, as in the Guardian incident, only serves to underline our inability to project a dignified image as a sovereign nation with respect to other countries. We were only too eager to placate Malaysia in the recent sad and ungraceful Sabah imbroglio. Finally, our attempts to apply the full force of the law in the case of the Chinese intrusion will challenge our ability to set the incident in the more significant context of our broader political and economic relations with China.

(The author is a retired Philippine Navy commodore. He is currently head of RCR Consultancy, a security risk management outfit. VERA Files is put out by veteran journalists taking a deeper look at current issues. Vera is Latin for “true.”)