Marcos launches Kalinisan program

MANILA, Philippines — President Marcos launched on Friday the Kalinisan program, which encourages Filipinos to maintain a clean and safe community that he stressed is the first step in addressing pollution, climate change and even criminality.

Kalinisan stands for Kalinga at Inisyatiba para sa Malinis na Bayan.

Marcos made the call in line with the celebration of Community Development Week and Community Development Day on Jan. 6.

“My friends, let us see in our barangay the changes we want for our nation,” the President said in a taped video message posted on the Presidential Communications Office’s Facebook account.

“Let our barangays be the laboratory of workable ideas, a showcase of what we can achieve together,” he said.

“Let’s start with cleanliness and orderliness,” Marcos said, noting that Filipinos do not deserve dirty, dingy or dark communities.

“At the end of the day, it is not only modern equipment that will win the war against waste. It will be won by citizens equipped with the habit not to litter and whose allegiance to a clean and green community has become second nature to them,” he said.

“Our rivers are not sewers through which trash flows out to seas that have become cesspools of our waste,” the Chief Executive added.

“Because of plastic, they have become dead pools of marine life, cellophanes choking corals to death, microplastics ending up in the fish that we eat,” he said.

Marcos vowed to pour in more funds “for the last and the least of society,” but said the government can only do so much.

“We cannot deploy sweepers who will follow each citizen around and pick up every trash that is thrown,” he stressed. “We cannot spend tens of billions a year collecting garbage whose volume could have been reduced through individual daily reuse and recycling.”

Marcos also called on concerned agencies to include community cleanliness in the performance guarantees of local government units and provide higher incentives to cleanest LGUs and those that actively implement the Gulayan sa Barangay program.

He also pushed for higher incentives for LGUs that utilize the Motor Vehicle User’s Charge for the lighting of national roads and tunnels, as well as the