Ann: 2020 Sustainability Highlights, page-7

First, I would implore you to go on a boat cruise on the Pasig river. Go from the largest inland lake all the way to the bay; AND observe the water, the people living at the banks or on the water itself! The rubbish everywhere!

Watch as you get closer and closer to the ancient walled Spanish City of Intramuros (Old Manila) the shear amount of slums and their environmental pressure (their discharge for lack of proper sewerage infrastructure) going straight into the river delta!

See the shear amount of float plastic and discarded debris as they empty into the bay. It is heart-breaking!

Then as you exit the river, there are tens of thousands of slums by the banks squatting on lands in phenomenal shanty towns! It is an experience you cannot forget! How do they eat, drink, sh!7? Where does all their excrement go? What happens to the thousands of tonnes of rubbish?

Once you get off your boat, don't go to the touristy Intramuros (Spanish walled city), go to China town and travel through the varying canals that the Spanish had dug up there hundreds of years back which now no one remembers how those canals zigzagging all around China Town (city of Binondo) got there unless you studied the local history. You'll notice it is chocked full of rubbish! Poor squatting locals basically dump their rubbish there since there's already a mound from decades of being the spot where everyone has thrown rubbish! Hell there's no proper efficient department for cleaning up or taking people's rubbish especially since they're SQUATTING on property they don't own! They don't pay local rates/taxes so why would the local barrio officials take their rubbish?

Now eat that nice fish they sell in their wet markets where stuff lays bare half the time without refrigeration caught fresh from their putrid waters!

hmmm tasty!