Baguio launches handbook to teach circular economy at schools

PRELOVED Baguio City, the country’s “ukay-ukay” capital, is a haven for secondhand goods. —VINCENT CABREZA

BAGUIO CITY — Grade school and high school teachers are using a handbook this school year that helps include lessons about recycling, reducing trash, and other green economy principles in various Baguio school subjects as part of the city’s Pansa-nopen Tayo waste management project.

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and Mayor Benjamin Magalong recently launched an 800-page circular economy resource book that was developed by Saint Louis University (SLU) teachers in order to help public school tutors introduce to schoolkids recycling and reuse practices nurtured and passed down for centuries by Baguio’s Ibaloy communities.

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Discussions about managing consumption have been integrated into Grade 2 Math lessons to teach “wise spending,” as well as into Grade 1 “Makabansa” lessons about the civic responsibility of preserving and maximizing use of natural resources, said Soraya Faculo, the city schools division superintendent.

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Magalong said that with the project, “We are planting the seeds of recycling in schools.” He credited educators like Dr. Joy Gutierrez and Amy Caguiao for drawing up the handbook.

Mantra and policy

Given prevailing climate changes and the urgent need to “transition from linear to circular economy,” Baguio has taken the lead to ensure that every resource consumed is reused, said Moeko Saito-Jensen, project manager of the UNDP-backed European Union-Philippine Green Economy Partnership, which is spending 16 million Euros on 16 local governments that have embraced principled waste management.

Baguio, she said, is one of 10 pilot cities developing waste reuse and recycling systems.

“Pansa-nopen Tayo” is Ibaloy for the phrase “Let us gather, preserve, and reuse community resources.” City managers have used the phrase as a mantra and a policy direction after Magalong abandoned waste-to-energy technologies and pursued zero-waste practices in 2024 to address the surge in locally generated trash.

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Waste produced by city dwellers, businesses, and tourists grew from 65,734.44 tons in 2022 to 80,471.93 tons last year. Pansa-nopen’s aim is to reduce residual waste and repurpose other forms of trash.

In 2025, Baguio allocated up to P118.123 million to transport trash to commercial landfills. The city had been spending an average of P200 million to haul rubbish to landfills in Tarlac and Pangasinan for 15 years after City Hall shut down its only open dump, following a fatal trash slide in 2011.

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“We find ourselves living in a world of profound contradictions. On one hand, we witness unprecedented technological breakthroughs, soaring human intellect, and global connectivity. On the other hand, we are witnessing the alarming degradation of our common home (because) global economies have operated on a deeply flawed linear premise of take, make, use, and dispose, (which is) an ecological and moral dead end,” said Fr. Gilbert Sales, SLU president .

Design framework

He said the handbook guides teachers in both public and private schools to explain to pupils that a circular economy “is an intentional design framework where waste is eliminated, products and materials are kept in use at their highest value, and natural systems are regenerated.”

The university, which is the largest and one of the oldest Baguio campuses, has been heeding “the rich tapestry of Catholic social teachings,” from Pope Paul VI who decreed in his encyclical “that development cannot be restricted to mere economic growth,” to Pope John Paul II who “consistently warned us against an insatiable consumerism that treats both human beings and nature as mere commodities,” Sales said.

He also cited the late Pope Francis who “condemned the throwaway culture that characterizes our modern world” through the encyclical Laudato Si, which “serves as the ultimate theological mandate for a circular economy (by demanding) that we reject wastefulness and instead construct systems that respect the interconnectedness of all creation.”

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Sales said the handbook also adapts the indigenous wisdom of the Cordilleras, whose ancestors “practiced circularity, ancestral stewardship, and deep reverence for the land long before modern science gave it a name.”