Philippines

Lilo-An's "Decentralized" Waste Water Treatment Facility Improves Cebu's Beaches
by Florian Steinberg and Bert van Ommen, ADB Manila
Reproduced with permission from Business World, 10 February 2006.

In this small town of 80,000 inhabitants, a bold initiative of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), with financial support from the Asian Development Bank (ADB), Manila has made a significant contribution to the improvement of coastal environment. On 23 November 2005, Lilo-an municipality, DENR and ADB inaugurated a decentralized water treatment facility which is going to clean all waste waters from a public market in Poblacion, which was known to be an environmental "hot spot" at Lilo-an's beach. This market had been polluting this popular weekend beach of the Cebuanos for many years, and had caused headaches and health concerns to many of the city's visitors and its administrators.

As DENR's advisor Dr. Andreas Koenig recalls: "The idea for this decentralized water treatment facility was born in 2003, during a seminar-workshop, which dealt with the mitigation of environmental pollution and discussed treatment of wastewater from households and from other domestic sources, such as markets. One of the outcomes of this workshop was that big centralized wastewater treatment facilities - common in Europe- are too costly and complicated in maintenance to be affordable for communities in the Philippines. One possible answer to this issue is the so-called "decentralized" wastewater treatment facilities. Decentralized wastewater treatment facilities are smaller units, which can be put up directly at the places of major wastewater outfalls by using the existing drainage, in this way intercepting the wastewater before being discharged into the environment. The treatment technology can be simple, low cost and simple in maintenance."

With the help of ADB, which provided a grant of $50,000 from its special fund for demonstration activities in the water and sanitation sector, and with the technical support of DENR this facility was developed during an 18-month period. The implementation of the project involved a lot of consultation with the city council, and the market vendors since they are the main cause of the liquids (from vegetables, fruits, fish and meats, as well as public toilets) which have been flowing in an uncontrolled fashion into the sea.

Fortunately, the market vendors realized that there is a connection between cleanliness of the beach, the arrival of tourists and weekend visitors at the beach and their own income. They all agreed to contribute a fee of P5/day to maintain this waste water treatment facility. With the Project in place, it will be their Lilo-an Community Multi Purpose Cooperative which will collect the fees and administer maintenance works of this facility.

"I am still in a state of disbelief, even up to this day, that we would be able to own, much more operate a Decentralized Wastewater Treatment Facility, which is, I think, the first of its kind in the nearby northern Cebu area" were the words of Lilo-an's Mayor Sevilla during the inauguration.

With this work inaugurated, this small town deserves the attention of all environmentalists and water-sanitation experts. For the first time in the Philippines such a decentralized water treatment facility has been inaugurated by a municipality. It has the capacity to absorb substantial growth of the market, and its sustainability is assured through the efforts of the market vendors. However, there is a much wider lesson to be learnt: As can be demonstrated from the financial return of this facility, similar facilities could even be built by other cities without the reliance on grants, once pre-financing can be secured. That lesson in itself should be taken very seriously by other cities. Or in the words of Dr. Koenig: "What you can see here is an entirely new approach to address the problems of sanitation in this country… Other LGUs will become interested in having a similar project."

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