A Time Series Study on the Hazardous Waste Generators (HWGs) of the Philippines
A CS 132 Capstone Project Submission for "PiliNut 2023": Pilipinas in a Nutshell
Submitted by Timothy Javier, Led Salazar and Nina Sapitula
Background of the Study
In the labyrinth of modern industry lies a hidden menace — hazardous waste.
In 2022, the Philippines has totalled about 252,800 tons of generated hazardous waste [1]. With the country's increasing population along with industrial and technological advancements done for economic progress, if measures to mitigate exploitative actions from Hazardous Waste Generators (HWGs) are not made, we can only expect that the yearly hazardous waste generation to follow.
Overproduction and unmanaged hazardous wastes have serious harmful consequences in the environment and in human health [2]. Hazardous wastes demand more efforts in analysis and segregation for their safe disposal. Therefore, there are limited locations that can accomodate them. Depending on the substance and quantity, hazardous waste pose a threat to land and marine biodiversity, those of which share the space.
The health of the citizens is also potentially compromised as there is increased exposure to toxins and pollutants. Human health complications due to hazardous substance susceptibility vary from minor discomforts like headaches and nausea to more serious issues such as genetic mutation and even death.
Group LNT recognizes the need to understand and assess the Philippines' current situation when it comes to Hazardous Waste Production. Thus, Project "Pulot Pinas" came to be. The project is an effort for the fulfilment of
Sustainable Development Goals #11 and #12 which are "Sustainable Cities and Communities" and "Repsonsible Consumption and Production".
The project aims to address the following questions:
Which regions have generated the most amount of hazardous waste over the years?
What is the most generated type of hazardous waste in NCR?
For these questions, the team has the following null hypotheses:
The population of a region is not directly proportional to the amount of hazardous waste.
Thus, we hypothesize that Region IV (CALABARZON), Region NCR (National Capital Region) and Region 3 (Central Luzon) among others would appear under this category as the regions making up almost 40% of the country's total population [1].
The National Capital Region does not yield mostly to Electronics-related wastes.
Due to rapid technological advancements and the region's being the center of urbanization, we presume that the National Capital Region would have generators yielding Electronics-related wastes like outdated gadgets and equipment the most among other hazardous wastes.
The primary source for our dataset is provided by the Environmental Management Bureau from the Department of Environment Resources of the Republic of the Philippines.
The organization continously monitors the establishment of new registered Hazardous Waste Generators as well as the maintenance of previously registered HWGs and makes the information readily available through their official webpage.
Moreover, the history of updates made to the dataset over the span of the dates June 17, 2020 and the present date is readily available. Modifying the range results in the filtering of the whole dataset in such a way that only those whose date of approval lies between the range reflect on the current presented dataset. Here, the No. of HWGs by Region is also provided via bar graph. Such data can also be manipulated by the date approved range feature.
Additionally, the organization monitors the amount of hazardous waste generated on each region.
The dataset provided started from the year 2012 up to the year 2022.
The said dataset contains a comprehensive detail on the amount (in tons) and the type of hazardous wastes produced in the Philippines.
In relation to the amount of hazardous waste generated source, the team also acquired a Philippine Standard Geographic Code (PSGC) vector maps (shapefiles) to visualize the data mentioned before.
There are different levels of vector maps available, from the national level down to the barangay level.
This vector map was sourced from public data and updated annually with the changes published by the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA).
As of April 17, 2024, there are over 33,000 observations from 2020 to 2024 on the HWGs dataset. The group interacted with the Microsoft Power BI interface of the source and set the range of date approved to be between January 1, 2022 to December 31, 2022. Furthermore, the sample population for this research is limited to the NCR region.
Therefore, the study considers only those HWGs whose operations are approved within the year 2022. Note that the working dataset does not correspond to all existing HWGs in the Philippines in the set range. Also, only HWGs within the NCR region will be included in the study. Note that findings made in this study does not necessarily reflect the trends of the whole Philippines.
As for the rest of the sources, the team utilized the total amount of hazardous waste generated by region and by type from 2012 to 2022 as the focus of the study is to analyze the waste on each region over the years.
Unfortunately, there are no records of the hazardous waste generated in Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM) all throughout the years. The team will not be able to include this region in the analysis.
Lastly, The data of the geometry (vector map) of the Philippines on Regional level was used to visualize the data on the map.
Data Extraction and Pre-processing
The group manually collected and collated the information on PowerBI interface to a Google Sheets file for ease of manipulation during exploratory analysis later on.
With the stated limitations, the total observations totaled to 7,582 HWGs.
During the encoding of the data, certain records had empty values. The team filled these in depending on Nature of Business and Details.
Similarly, machine learning AI is planned to be applied to analyze and further segregate the observations according to their accompanying attributes to account for differing characters.
Categorization, in this manner, is based on the presence of shared words and similar themes.
Since the amuont of waste dataset is in the form of a Google Sheets file, simple extraction was made by copying the total amount columns on each region, repeated for every year.
This creates a datasheet containing a row for each region, filled with total amount of waste generated for each year in their correspondong columns.
For it to be visualized, we only needed to download the regional level shapefile.
Note that a vector map cannot be directly open unlike sheets. A processing libary called geopandas was applied.
The HWGs dataset shows the directory of all the existing HWGs in the Philippines. Each HWG has the following attributes:
Region: pertains to the region in which the location of the HWG belongs to
Nature of Business: pertains to the type of industry or trade the HWG performs
Nature: pertains to the state of matter of the HWG’s waste primarily generated
HW Code: pertains to the category in which the waste generated is put based on characteristics and origin
Details: pertains to other pertinent information regarding the waste generated
Considering the scope of this study, the dataset size is set to be about 7582 HWGs whose dates of approval lie within the range of January 1, 2022 to December 31, 2022.
The total waste dataset shows the amounting waste of each region for 2012 to 2022.
Results
Null Hypothesis
The population of a region is not directly proportional to the amount of hazardous waste
Verdict: False
Which regions have generated the most amount of hazardous waste over the years?
The hazardous waste generated by each region is given by the interactive slide deck on this side. Feel free to scroll and compare the status of the Philippines over the years from 2012 up to 2022.
As we can see, the interactive figure above visualizes the harardous waste generated on each region over the year 2012 to 2022. The results show that the region that have generated on year 2012 up to 2022 are the following in sequence: Region IV-A, Region IV-A, Region X, Region III, Region III, CAR, CAR, Region IV-A, Region IV-A, Region IV-A.
It's especially interesting to see Region IV, CALABARZON, has produced about 6 million tons of waste produced in the year 2013, which is marked as the highest waste production intensity. Alarmingly, CALABARZON has consistently been a part of the highest intensity regions in each respective year.
To prove the validity of the hypothesis, linear regression was used with an alpha value of 0.05. The test yielded the relationship between a region's population and hazardous waste generation to be significant, with a p-value of 2.832 x 10^-6. As such, the null hypothesis is rejected and the presented alternate hypothesis is true, that is, the population of a region is directly proportional to the amount of hazardous waste.
This implies that more people lead to more industrical, residential, or commercial activities that produce hazardous waste.
Unfortunately, there is an impact as well to the environment, this relationship highlights the damage with population growth, eseentially saying that more people leads to more waste.
As an effect, this concerns the public health, there is a need for more resources toward hazardous waste management, better sustainable practices, and urban planning.
Null Hypothesis
"The National Capital Region mostly has generators yielding Electronics-related wastes."
Verdict: Inconclusive
What is the most generated type of hazardous waste in NCR?
As can be observed from the bar graph above, it is confirmed that 'Electronic Wastes' prevail in generation quantity in
the National Capital Region, amounting to about 1250 Hazardous Waste Generators. Following leading hazardous waste
generators in clude 'Mercury and its Compounds', 'Industrial Oils' and 'Lead Compounds' which are common substances in the
production of luminescent and temperature-measuring products, machines and ammunition respectively. However, this is not
enough to prove that Electronic Wastes are statistically the most generated type of waste in the National Capital Region.
This hypothesis was based on the report published by the Philippine Statistics Authority that states that the National Capital
Region is around 100% urbanized. It is therefore reasonable to expect that there is a significant amount of electrical waste
produced in the National Capital Region. The researchers focused on the National Capital Region due to this fact but are yet
unable to prove the conclusiveness of the hypothesis. Future studies can focus on extending their scope to other regions as well
to test the effect of urbanization on the type of hazardous waste generated.
An Overview of the Amount of Hazardous Waste Generators in the Philippines
From the graphs, it is clear that the region with the leading number of hazardous waste generators is the National Capital Region, with CALABARZON (Region IV-A) close behind it.
This data on the number of hazardous waste generators registered along with the data on the amount of hazardous waste produced seem to indicate that more generators leads to more hazardous waste.
This ties in with our first hypothesis that population is directly proportional to the amount of hazardous waste generated.
The data was decomposed into trends and patterns through the use of Seasonal AutoRegressive Integrated Moving Average, the results of which are shown on the left.
The following regions: NCR, Central Luzon, MIMAROPA, Zamboanga Peninsula, and Northern Mindanao, seem to have a downward trend in the number of hazardous waste generators registered.
On the other hand, the regions V, VI, VIII, and XIII seem to have an upward trend in the number of hazardous waste generators registered.
The remaining regions seem to have a horizontal trend, suggesting that there is no relative increase or decrease in the number of hazardous waste generators registered.
These trends could suggest that the process of urbanization may be correlated with an increase in the number of hazardous waste generators being registered.
This would explain why already urbanized regions such as the NCR are experiencing a downward trend.
This also aligns with our first hypothesis that population is directly proportional to the amount of hazardous waste generated, as population growth can be an indicator of urbanization.
Forecast Prediction: How many more will there be?
The analysis will be limited to the National Capital Region, as there doesn’t seem to be any general trends in the forecast for each region. In the forecast, a pattern of two spikes in the number of hazardous waste generators registered has been seen since 2021.
The first is a downward spike in March, and the second is an upward spike in October. Of note, October is around the start of the holiday season while March is around the end.
This pattern, supported by the fact that the leading type of hazardous waste generators registered in the NCR in 2022 is for electrical waste and equipment, could suggest that the holiday season, particularly the selling of electrical props and fixtures such as parols, causes spikes in the number of hazardous waste generators registered.
It is reasonable to believe that citizens in highly urbanized areas such as the NCR would have more disposable income, and therefore be more inclined toward buying these electrical props and fixtures.
Thus, the increase of hazardous waste generators registered in NCR during the holiday season could be connected to the level of urbanization of NCR.
Conclusion and Call to Action
The study found that there is a strong correlation between the population of each region, and the amount of hazardous waste each region produces.
Moreover, trends in the data seem to suggest that urbanization could be correlated to the number of hazardous waste generators registered in a year.
If this is true, this would further support that population growth, as an indicator of urbanization, causes an increase in the production of hazardous waste.
As an example, the NCR seems to experience spikes in the number of registered hazardous waste generators during the holiday season.
This could be attributed to the selling of electrical props and fixtures during the holidays, which is made possible by the level of urbanization of the region.
These findings are worrisome because population growth and urbanization are factors that could affect the production of hazardous waste but not factors that can easily be affected by the general populace.
Regardless, these findings urge us to recognize the amount of waste we produce and, if possible, consider where we may cut down consumption. On the individual level, with this renewed sense of conscience on the
state of our environment and growing population, let this be motivation for the Filipino to be more conservative in the consumption and motivation of production
of wastes and be proactive in volunteer operations.
Moreover, these findings emphasize the importance of waste management—be it hazardous or not, especially in a third-world country like the Philippines which continues to grow and develop. This applies most especially to
ruling-bodies who have the power to legislate and implement more environmentally-friendly solutions with minimal impact on economic ventures and, more importantly, have a
stricter surveillance over factories and their responsibility to uphold ethical waste and by-product management operations.
We can't save the world by playing by the rules because the rules have to be changed.
We are a team of BS Computer Science students from the University of the Philippines Diliman. Under the guidance of Prof. Paul Regonia in the "Introduction to Data Science" (CS 132) course, Project "Pulot Pinas" was produced as the final output in June, 2024.
Timothy Javier
He writes - be it code or literature. An enthusiast of trading card games, he also loves to play video games in his free time.
Led Salazar
Passionate programmer enjoying personal projects that solves mundane real life tasks. On his free time, his go-to would be movies and series. Loves to seek adventure and with great interest above the sky!
Nina Sapitula
With interests in pursuing Health Informatics, she is a data analysis enthusiast with advocacies also inclined towards marine environment preservation. A singer with passion!.
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