Perception and practice of household waste disposal: a participatory household survey in Calamba City, Philippines


 This report describes the household survey of practices and perceptions about waste management in the Philippines. The survey employs a participatory approach involving community members. It was found that a household holds, on the average, 2.69 kg of various wastes at any day. The prominent wastes include plastics, recyclables, and food residues. Despite well-established legal and administrative structures, most people do not know the location of facilities, and the majority do not understand the collection schedule. Respondents support the idea of better waste management and state voluntary contributions well above the environmental fee proposed by the local government.


Introduction
1 This research was funded by Japan Society for Promotion of Science (JSPS) KAKENHI Grant Number 26380251 "Role of information in promoting voluntary contribution to public goods among heterogeneous individuals". Our special thanks go to people in Barangay Looc; Barangay Captain, Barangay Councilors, Barangay Head Nurse, and Barangay Health Workers who generously shared with us their experiences and knowledge. We would like to acknowledge administrative and technical supports provided by City Environment and Natural Resources Office (CENRO). We thank all the inputs and assistance provided but any errors remain with us. The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
As the first step to clarify the behavioral aspects of the waste management problem in the Philippines, this study assesses current actual waste disposal practices and the awareness about the services, facilities, and regulations concerning waste management at the household level in Barangay Looc, one of the most floodprone barangays in Calamba City. The scope of this study is set at a community level for the following reasons: 1) we would like to identify concrete waste management issues as practical challenges at the community level, 2) the result of study can be used directly to support the community and enable them to improve their living environment, and 3) the local government agencies could use or replicate the study to monitor the effectiveness of their efforts. The study conducts a participatory household survey in which community members (i.e. Barangay officials and Barangay Health Workers) are engaged in designing, implementing, and following up activities.
The survey results reveal that most people are not aware of the existence of facilities, and the majority is not well informed about the details of the regular collection schedule and locations. Majority of the respondents endorse the need for a better waste management system and state their readiness to contribute resources well above the proposed Calamba City Environmental User Fee. Our participatory observations suggest that the survey prompted some waste management initiatives among community members.
We conclude that participatory household survey at the community level helps initiating collective actions and promoting behavioral changes for improved waste management This paper is organised as follows. Section 2 overviews the characteristics of the study area, followed by the administrative structure and waste management services at the Barangay level in Section 3. Based on the key informant interviews and household surveys, Section 4 reports the survey results; waste disposal practices, awareness and perception about waste disposal practices, and the stated voluntary contribution of money and time to the collective waste management. In Section 5, we discuss the potential of improving waste management at the community level. Section 6 makes general conclusions about the study. The supplementary materials include interview schedules of key informants, survey questionnaires in English, the list of wastes and disposal practices, data, and data processing codes.

General overview of Barangay Looc, Calamba City
Barangay Looc is one of the 54 Barangays of Calamba City, bordering the southeastern shore of Laguna Lake. Calamba City is a first-class city in Laguna province and a typical semi-urban township in the Philippines 5 . It is located 54 kilometres south of Manila with a land area of 179.1 hectares and a population of 459,021 in 3,945 households in 2015 (Calamba City, 2017). Two major tributaries of Laguna Lake flow through Barangay Looc -San Cristobal and the San Juan ( Figure 1A). The two rivers encompass many widely spread barangays. For instance, the sources of San Cristobal river originate in Tagaytay City of Cavite Province in the upland passing through as many as 40 barangays through three provinces (Laguna, Cavite and Batangas). The majority (21 out of 40) of these barangays along San Cristobal river belong to Calamba City ( Figure 1B). Figure 1A Barangay Looc with three rivers Figure 1B The San Cristobal river basin passing through various cities and municipalities In addition to the demographic and topographical characteristics, the following factors increase the severity of waste management issues in Calamba City. First, the population has grown rapidly over the last decades. The average annual growth rate of population between 2010 and 2015 in Calamba City was 4.3 % which is much higher than the projected national average population growth rate of 1.8 % for the same period (National Statistics Office, 2014). Second, the estimated quantity of solid waste in Laguna Lake region is the second-highest in the Philippines, amounting to 11 %, following the Metro Manila region 6 .
5 The cities and municipalities in the Philippines are classified by population and annual income from the first to sixth classes. The cities with average domestic income of past four years of above 400 million pesos (about 8 million US$) are categorized as the first-class cities. 6 40,087 mt of solid waste is estimated to be generated per day in the Philippines and 23% (9,213 mt) of which are originated in the Metropolitan Manila and 11 % (4,440 mt per day) in Region 4A (CALABARZON) i.e., Laguna Lake region (Senate of the Philippines, 2017).
Third, being located along the Laguna Lake shoreline and downstream of two major river estuaries make Calamba City particularly susceptible to waste dumping and accumulation. Out of the 54 barangays in Calamba City, 32 are frequently damaged by flooding (Calamba City, 2017;p. 34). Most flood-prone communities are located along the San Cristobal river, and Barangay Looc is one of them.

Administrative structure and institutions for household solid waste management
As early as 1938, the Philippines had already established legal and administrative systems related to solid waste management (Official Gazette, 1938)  process, and recycle biodegradables up to 1.5 tons per day 9 . The City of Calamba advocates clusters of Barangays to jointly build composting facilities to collect and process the biodegradable wastes 10 ( Calamba City, 2017, pp.96-98).
Eco-centres collect, segregate and make use of recyclables (e.g., paper, cartons, plastics, glass bottles). In Barangay Looc, there are two Eco-centers; a Barangay Eco-center in a communal space and a School Ecocenter at the Looc Elementary School. A School Eco-center is integrated into the school waste education program (Eco-waste sa eskwela) organised jointly by CENRO and Department of Education (Matsumoto et al., 2017). The Eco-centre at Looc Elementary School School has separate containers located in the school buildings. Recyclables are stored and collected by private junk shops 11 . The Barangay Eco-centre is a rainproof concrete facility for residents to bring papers, plastics, metals, and bottles, segregate and store them for collection and recycling.
CENRO organises and holds Public Information, Education and Communication Campaign (PIECC) for residents to raise awareness, ensure compliance to the ordinances, and promote reduction, reuse and recycling of waste. CENRO also disseminates information by conducting door-to-door visits of households, holding workshops and film shows, and using social media.
Despite these comprehensive legal and administrative frameworks and the provision of required facilities, the actual implementation of waste management and compliance have remained poor. Senate Economic Planning Office stated, "(M)ore than 15 years after the passage of RA9003, the enforcement with the law remains a daunting task" (Senate of the Philippines, 2017). In the following sections, we report the results of a participatory household survey to examine practices and perceptions about waste management, 9 PaLiSam Composting Facility is located in Barangay Lingga neighboring to Looc. Biodegradable wastes are collected from the market (Calamba Trade Centre) and fast-food retailers, composted and transformed into fertilizer (Calamba City, 2017, p.67). 10 Four proposed clusters are Banadero (consisting 17 Barangays including three lake shore barangays Looc, Uwisan, and Lingaa), Canlubang (consisting of 10 Barangays), Prinza (12 Barangays) and Lamesa (15 Barangays). 11 The participating schools provide at least a set of four receptables in front of each classroom for biodegradable, recyclable, special and residual wastes. Education program consists of information dissemination seminars and outdoor activities (such as clearing school yards and segregating wastes). Matsumoto et.al. (2017) reports detail functioning of various Eco-centers.
illuminate the specific issues facing the community, and identify possible ways to overcome such a daunting task.

Household solid waste disposal practices, awareness, and perceptions
The survey of the sampled 120 households was conducted between 25 August and 5 September 2016. The key questions are chosen to examine waste disposal related attributes (e.g. perceptions, awareness, and practices) together with some key household characteristics. The sample size is set so that statistical analyses of some key variables can be made and so that the money and workforce required for the survey are kept at a modest level 12 . Twelve Barangay Health Workers (BHWs) of the Barangay Looc Health Centre were engaged in scoping focus group discussions, conducting household interviews, and postsurvey feedback discussion. BHWs were consulted in the sampling stage as they are in charge of keeping the most up-to-date list of all households in the community, and they are assigned to different zones to cover entire barangay. The interview schedules, sampling strategy and questionnaires are included in the supplementary materials 13 . Data file and codes of data analyses are also made available in the supplementary material. One of the authors (Baltazar) conducted all key informant interviews, trained BHWs and supervised daily conducts of questionnaires and encoding.

Description of the sampled households
The distribution of households in the different income categories and their primary sources of livelihood suggest that they are heterogeneous in terms of social and economic characteristics (Table 1). About twothirds of the households are categorised as poor or low-income households. One-fourth of them are below a poverty threshold (monthly expenditure with monthly expenditure below 1,812 PhP per capita per month to cover basic needs (Philippines Statistics Authority, 2016b). The households below lower-income 12 The minimum sample size is chosen to test significance of key binomial attributes on some variables of interest (say waste disposal behavior, awareness, or willingness to contribute) at significance level of 5% (two sided), statistical power of 80% with minimum detectable size as one standard deviation (Supplementary appendix S4 for more detail). 13 The original questionnaires in Tagalog, training materials for enumerators, and encoding forms are available from one of Corresponding author.
categories tend to live in houses with temporary natural materials such as palm leaves and bamboos and take drinking water from wells rather than purified sources.
Self-employment such as driving tricycles, running grocery stores (sarisari stores), and selling cooked food or providing various services (e.g., manicures, motorcycle maintenance), as well as waged employment, are common sources of livelihood. Most households have diversified multiple sources of income. Majority of the households have migrated from other provinces.

Types and quantities of the household wastes
The respondents are asked to enumerate all waste items held by the household at the time of interview using the list of 73 wastes of the following types -leftover food, types of paper items, types of plastic bottles, types of soft plastics, and hard plastics. This list was drawn during the focus group discussion with BHWs who were then trained to administer survey questionnaires visiting the sampled households. The respondents were asked to enumerate the estimated quantities of each waste item either in approximate weights or numbers of pieces. The weights or pieces were then converted using the conversion rates 14 .
On average, a household held about 2.69 kg or 57 pieces of various waste any day. PET bottles and plastics account for 60% of the weight and 90% of pieces of wastes ( Figure 2 and Appendix 1). The proportion of recyclable wastes (including food, paper, PET bottles) is substantial, amounting to 78.57 % of total waste in weight. The proportion of food waste is 50 % of the total recyclable waste, weighing 770g on average. Households of poor and middle-income categories tend to hold more PET bottles and plastic wastes, while middle-income households have more paper wastes 15 .

Figure 2 Composition of household wastes by waste types and by income classes
14 Supplementary material (S3) includes the complete list of these 73 wase items by category and the conversion rates. The conversion rates were made based on actual weighing of the items. 15 The differences of types of wastes held by income categories reflect different consumption choices (e.g. consumption with reusable containers by higher income household, and small sachets packages by low income households) as well as regular recycling behaviors.

Self-reported waste disposal practices
Part (a) of Table 2 reports the disposal practices of all waste items enumerated by the income category.
The numbers of reported practices count effective responses specifying among the following practices for each waste types: "to burn" or "to throw", "to store in the house for collection", "to recycle", and "to reuse and reduce". The responses without no specific reference to these practices are recorded as the disposal practice is "unknown". It is noticeable that only a fraction (16%) of disposal practices state specific ways by which the wastes are disposed. Disposal practices of most (84 %) wastes remain "unknown" which means respondents are unable or unwilling to answer. Among the known disposal practices, "reusing or reducing" is the most frequently reported known practices. A substantial part of food wastes is reused for feeding pigs and other domestic animals which is common practices among the less well-off households. Notes: 1 For each waste item held by the household, every respondent is asked to specify a likely disposal practice. 2 Respondents are asked to list all known ordinances (that are rules and regulations). 1 is assigned when at least one ordinance is stated by the respondent, and 0 otherwise.

Knowledge of ordinances and waste disposal practices
Open-ended questions are asked to examine whether and to what extent residents know of the rules and regulations about waste disposal promoted by City's Public Information, Education Communication Campaigns (PIECC). About half of the respondents (54 out of 105) can state at least one of the recommended practices or rules (Table 2 part (b)). The frequently stated practices in order of descending frequencies are 'waste segregation and recycling (25)', 'proper waste disposal in designated areas including no littering (23)', and 'cleaning own yard (10)'. Table 2 together suggest that the majority of residents of all income categories understand proper and improper waste disposal practices, yet most wastes are discarded in unknown ways, perhaps improperly. Such dissonance between knowing proper waste disposal practices and not-knowing of actual disposal practices is also evident in Table 3 which reports disposal practices disaggregated by the level of awareness, i.e., whether respondents know at least one of the ordinances. Respondents who know at least one ordinance tend to report more likely to recycle and to store their waste than those without no such knowledge. However, knowing ordinances does not seem to make any noticeable differences in the frequencies of improper practices of burning and throwing wastes. Those who are aware of the rules are less likely to reuse and reduce but more likely to report unknown practices for their wastes.

Awareness of waste disposal facilities and scheduled collections
Daily waste collection along the main streets is the main waste management service provided by the local government. The City of Calamba subcontracts a private hauler to collect, transport, and dispose them of at sanitary landfill sites following a predetermined detailed schedule (Calamba City, 2017, pp.43-66).
Detailed daily collection schedule of every 54 Barangays in Calamba City is made by the City Solid Waste to collect residential wastes from Barangay Looc regularly, five days a week, except Thursdays and Saturdays. Appendix 2 shows the detail of weekly collection. Each truck passes two to six barangays on any scheduled collection days (column (2)    To assess the effectiveness of the waste management facilities, respondents are asked whether they know of the location and functions of the existing facilities. Only about 31% of 120 respondents understand that the facilities exist (the first row of Table 4). Even among those who are aware of the waste-related ordinances, only 36 % know of the functions of these facilities, which is not significantly higher than those who are not aware of any ordinance (p-value = 0.141). Among those who can state the functioning of these facilities, about 26% know them correctly. Respondents' knowledge of ordinances does not seem to correlate at all with their awareness of the waste-related facilities.

Stated contribution of money or time to a possible collective waste management system
The willingness to make a voluntary contribution to the community-based waste management system is asked in the hypothetical context by asking: "A supposed localised waste management system will entail costs of operations that will be shouldered by the community itself. How much is your household willing to contribute to make such a system operational?" Table 5 reports 115 effective responses to this question. All but six of them respond to contribute some  Note: Respondents are asked to state contribution in Philippine Pesos (PhP) and/or person-hours to the question "A supposed localised waste management system will entail costs of operations that will be shouldered by the community itself. How much is your household willing to contribute to make such a system operational?" The total monetary value of the stated contribution of low-income households appears higher than those of other income categories. However, the differences are not statistically significant 17 . In summary, households of all income categories in Barangay Looc are willing to make more or less the same contribution: lower-income households contribute more time, while middle-income households contribute more money. 17 p-values of non parametric test of differences of means between income categories are 0.11 between poor and low income, 0.33 between low and middle income, and 0.35 between poor and middle income.

Waste disposal practices and perception of waste management services
The survey results show that despite well-established legal and administrative structures of solid waste management from the national to the local community levels in the Philippines, improper waste disposal practices persist at the household level. First, less than half of the respondents can state any rules related to household waste disposal (Table 2 (b)). Even among those who can state at least one rule, the majority are unable (or unwilling) to report how they actually dispose ( However, care must be taken to interpret the estimated excess capacity of the waste collection. For one thing, the actual quantity of disposed waste could be much larger, considering the additional wastes transported to the community either by being carried from the upstream through rivers or by illicit dumping. Another point is that the effective collection capacity could be much smaller than the capacity of collection trucks because of the impossibility of loading up to the maximum capacity and the difficulty of compacting bagged wastes. The above results suggest factors contributing to the apparent waste problems are at least in part, ineffective and inappropriate usage of existing waste management services and the mismatch between awareness of waste-related ordinances and conscious practices. Taking these into account, it is reasonable to conclude that waste disposal problems in Barangay Looc are not simply a lack of facilities or services provided by the city, but rather the combination of lack of coordinated action by the residents and the potential effects of dumping or waste transported to the community.

Stated voluntary contribution to operationalise a community-based waste management
The median value of residents' stated voluntary contribution is estimated as 89.1 PhP per month. This implies that the majority of residents of all income categories would agree to pay this amount to implement a well-functioning waste management system ( be the lower bound of the foreseen costs to maintain the current waste management system under the assumption of the actual diversion properly taken place. Nevertheless, the survey results suggest that the majority of the households from all income categories may endorse a higher contribution toward more sustainable waste management if it were to improve the waste management in their communities.

Concluding remarks
The household survey of waste disposal practices and perception in Barangay Looc shows the apparent gap between waste disposal mandated by the national and local governments and actual waste disposal practices and perception of the residents. Yet, the residents' stated voluntary contribution of money and time indicates there exists a substantial demand for sustainable waste management services. The majority states to contribute 89.1 PhP per month or morewell above the currently proposed City Environmental User Fee.
This study found out that there is ample potential for the City of Calamba to strengthen its waste management strategies by mobilising initiatives at the community level. The strategies may include the 19 The City has set an ambitious target to divert as much as 50% of household waste immediately, and upto 89% by 2025 (Calamba City, 2017, pp. 84, 92, 104).
introduction of modern waste treatment infrastructure alternative to standard landfill. The inter-city coordination will support viable operation which any single local government alone could not implement. 20 Potential actions for practical improvement can be initiated by the enhanced cooperation between local government and its communities. On the one hand, the city could improve the efficiency of existing waste collection through better scheduling, coordination with communities, junkshops, informal collectors, and enhanced facilities and practices. On the other hand, community participation in feasible scheduling and allocation of collection capacities should be one of the immediate agenda.
Lastly, the methodological insights are in order. This household survey is undertaken with the active engagement of community members. In addition to the twelve community health workers who conducted the survey, focus group discussions with Barangay officials, local government officers, waste haulers, junk shop owners, and waste pickers are also held. This participatory survey approach appeared to have promoted some self-organised waste management initiatives in the community as much as the survey process itself benefitted from their involvement. During one of the debriefing meetings with BHWs, a halfday community-wide cleanup was proposed and implemented several months later. In addition, the Barangay resolution for community-based waste management projects has been proposed 21 . These evidences suggest that the participatory survey methodology helps community members by themselves identify specific waste disposal issues and initiate feasible actions. Since the survey methodology developed in this report is easily replicable, it can be readily used a part of outreach awareness-raising campaign by the stakeholders for the stakeholders that could be used in other communities.