Filipino environmentalist’s can-do attitude

A Filipino resident collects cans to recycle and raise money for this native country.

Michael Manlogon collects aluminium cans to recycle and then donates the money he receives to schoolchildren in his native Philippines. Mona Al Marzooqi / The National

Michael Manlogon can look at a used aluminium can and see its true value.

While some would regard the item as trash, Mr Manlogon considers them a way of sending underprivileged children to school.

About three years ago he started collecting used soft drinks cans from restaurants and food courts to sell to scrap metal merchants for recycling.

Mr Manlogon, 39, saves the money to donate to schoolchildren in his native Philippines.

Back in rural Quezon province, where his parents are from, most people work as farmers or fishermen. Often, parents need their offspring to contribute to the families’ income.

Hence, says World Vision, the US charity through which he donates, one in five Filipino schoolchildren never finishes primary education.

“You cannot blame them,” said Mr Manlogon, 39, who has lived in Abu Dhabi for 13 years.

At present, he is supporting three children through World Vision’s child sponsorship programme, at Dh55 a month each, and donates the rest to two elementary schools in his parents’ town.

Compared to the size of some donations, Mr Manlogon’s may not be much.

But he insists it’s not just about the money; it’s also helping the environment by encouraging businesses and people to recyle.

He became interested in recycling when he saw images of destruction from a typhoon that hit the Philippines a few years ago. In the trash he saw floating around in the aftermath of the storm, he saw products that could have been reused.

“We saw a lot of waste in the streets, and this is a cost to the people, who don’t care,” he said.

Mr Manlogon works as a supervisor at the Abu Dhabi Cooperative Society, though he describes himself as a “full-time environmentalist”.

Most evenings, or on his days off, he leaves his apartment near Hamdan Street and heads over to friends’ houses or nearby restaurants to retrieve their cans. He says he manages to collect an average of 150 cans on each trip, with about 100 cans weighing one kilogram..

He then takes the cans back to his apartment, removes the pull tabs and rinses them. He stores them in bags in his room, which he shares with his wife, Naomi, until he is ready to crush them.

After he’s collected about 20kg, he takes them to the scrap metal merchant where he sells them for Dh3.75 per kilogram.

On Tuesday morning, he headed to Oriental Korner Restaurant to meet its owner, Cristina Veloso, who is also from the Philippines.

Here, staff had put aside for him a large plastic bag of cans.

Ms Veloso said they used to just throw away the cans until Mr Manlogon persuaded them to keep them for him.

“I feel happy to help,” she said. “I wanted to help more than that.”

It goes back to the project being about lifestyle choices, rather than money alone.

“You don’t need to take directly from their pockets,” Mr Manlogon said. “They can do something else to raise the money.”

As well as the three children he is supporting through the charity, him and his wife also have three children of their own, who live with his mother in the Philippines. He says his offspring are proud of what he does.

“They know what I’m doing, because sometimes when I squash or press the cans in my room, they are online, and I’m chatting with them while doing my recycling thing,” he said. “They know that I’m helping kids like them go to school and give school supplies.”

As for how others can help, he says he hopes people will segregate their trash – or, even better, to join him in collecting cans that would otherwise just end up in landfill sites.