With almost all kids now on summer vacation, Environment and Natural Resources Secretary Ramon J. P. Paje is urging parents to make an effort of teaching their children on proper waste segregation.

“Throughout the year, our children get educated by teachers. This summer vacation, I urge parents to take over and teach their children household chores, including the proper way of segregating household garbage,” Paje said.

“In fact, parents or the older children could come up with creative ways to make waste segregation fun and even income-generating by selling collected empty bottles and old newspapers and magazines to the neighborhood junk shop,” Paje added.

Paje made the appeal as the agency begins its heightened campaign against the mounting garbage problem in Metro Manila by intensifying its information and education campaign with the distribution of easy-to-understand campaign materials in barangays in Metro Manila. “As the family is the most basic unit of the society, it is but a must for proper ecological solid waste management to start at the households,” said Paje.

The DENR recently launched a number of information materials on solid waste management at the Crowne Plaza Manila Galleria in Mandaluyong City, where Metro Manila’s local environment officers pledged to farm out the materials to households, in coordination with barangay officials.

During the launch, some 5,000 copies of “Ecological Solid Waste Management for Households,” “Makakalikasang Pamamaraan ng Pamamahala sa Basura,” “Bawasan Ang Basurang Itatapon: Magsegregate,” “Solid Waste Management Made Easy,” and “Proper Segregation of Solid Waste,” were distributed to the participants, including the 12-page “Basura Monster” coloring book written by TV news personality Christine Bersola-Babao.

“We hope that we could even more effectively manage our wastes at home as we have made the information materials easy to understand as our primary goal is to make solid waste management understandable to all, even by little children,” Paje stressed.

Paje also called upon local executives to reproduce the materials as a step to widen and speed up the circulation of the printed materials within their respective constituencies. The move came at the heels of studies made by the Metro Manila Development Authority (MMDA) showing that Metro Manila’s daily waste generation (DWG) has risen to 8,746 tons from 8,400 tons in 2010.

“With almost a 24-percent share in the national daily waste generation of 35,000 tons in 2010, getting 15.5 million residents of Metro Manila to segregate their waste ‘at source’ or at household level will definitely have a cascading impact on the overall effort in transforming our people into a nation of into environmentally-proactive, environmentally-concerned citizens of the land,” Paje stressed.

This point was supported by MMDA General Manager Corazon Jimenez who said that the DENR’s intensified campaign for mandatory segregation shores up MMDA’s efforts to bring down Metro Manila’s daily waste generation by 50 percent.