Oil and Water mix for a cause By Ann Corvera The Philippine Star 07/09/2006
Who says water and oil can’t mix? Olivia la O’ Castillo is taking up the cudgels for responsible and sustainable consumption of both resources.
She was a shy housewife who could bake up a storm but couldn’t speak before an audience. One day, she decided to go back to school and there she found a cause that took her all the way to the United Nations. From then on, the world became her kitchen.
"(United Nations) Secretary General Kofi Annan felt that the global focus on water was decreasing," Castillo explains why the UN Secretary General’s Advi-sory Board on Water and Sanitation was created in 2004. She is one of three Asians selected as policy advisors to the board; the other two are former Japanese Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto–who was its chairman but who passed away last week–and China’s water resources minister Shucheng Wang. Castillo leaves today for Paris to attend the body’s sixth meeting.
Last March, the 20-man board came up with a "compendium of actions", an "ambitious water workplan on a global scale" that aims to ensure that the waterand sanitation target enshrined in the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) are met. In adopting the MDG, nations have pledged to halve by 2015 the more than one billion people lacking access to safe drinking water and 2.4 billion without basic sanitation.
"Based on studies conducted by the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank, it’s really the lack of financial, technical and human resources that’s impeding the assistance of government (to the water agenda), that’s why networking and partnering with industries and media is important," stresses this housewife who later became professor and business department chair at Miriam College. She is now part of the water board’s financing committee.
Solving the water problem is central to solving the global problem of poverty and achieving sustainable development.
In the Philippines, a study conducted by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) showed that nine major urban centers, including Metro Manila, face a severe water crisis if water management remains inefficient.
Castillo recalls that when chairman Hashimoto visited Sierra Leone in Africa, there were only two toilets for 1,800 students–and one of them was reserved for teachers.
"In the Philippines, we are not far from that example," she laments. "A lot of places here don’t have clean toilets and water. So with this Kofi Annan program and with financing support, I hope we will be able to help the local governments" provide adequate facilities.
The World Bank recently expressed alarm over the Philippines’ poor sanitation and sewerage infrastructure, owing to under-investment in the sector and ineffective implementation of existing laws. The overall economic loss for the country due to water pollution is about $1.3 billion a year.
But water is not all that concerns Castillo as she notes how environmental issues branch out. This is where her other passion comes in.
"There are so many things to cover in the environment. But now we are focusing on water and renewable alternative energy," she says.
Amid the wave of bio-fuel projects that seek to lessen the world’s dependence on fossil fuels, Castillo is pushing for the development of used cooking oil as fuel. The project is in partnership with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
Castillo sat with STARweek following a trip to Osaka, Japan to attend a board meeting after she was appointed policy advisor to the UNEP International Environmental Technology Center.
For someone who made the kitchen her domain for years and even went to 10 different culinary schools to hone her skills, Castillo knows the extent of cooking oil usage. She warns that the common practice of reusing cooking oil is a health hazard.
"Do you know that in Thailand, they have 400 cases of cancer of the colon caused by using used cooking oil?" Castillo asks, adding that a Thai law penalizes such practice with a fine of 50,000 Baht or P75,000.
The used cooking oil project was what got Castillo’s attention when was invited to attend a bio-fuel workshop in Krabi, Thailand.
She recalls a prior visit to a bio-fuel plant in Graz, Austria when her daughter participated in an exchange program. "Every afternoon, the housewives are given yellow containers," she relates. "These are collected then brought to the plant. The public buses are using used cooking oil as fuel."
Not only is this alternative fuel cheaper, she says, but it also helps clean the environment.
She also discovered that in Canada, 60 million of liters of used cooking oil are converted into fuel. In Chiang Mai, Thailand there are eight filling stations. In Bangkok, filling stations have a total capacity of 6,000 liters.
Unfortunately, her enthusiasm for the project is not widely shared. The same thing happened to her efforts in promoting the water agenda. "So I thought I will do it the silent way with people who will listen to me," she says, citing the cooperation mostly of local governments.
They will also forge partnerships with the private sector. "We have talked to (fastfood chain) Jollibee because it alone uses five million liters of cooking oil a year! So we will see how that goes," she adds.
In spite of the frustrations with the bureaucracy, Castillo says she dislikes criticizing the government. She’d rather "look for a way around the problem."
"If the government sees that we already have a filling station, siguro naman they will open their eyes and will give their support," she says.
The target is to have a filling station in Metro Manila with a capacity of 2,000 liters of fuel from used cooking oil in one or two years, at a cost of between P5 million to P10 million.
While in Krabi, Castillo met one of Thailand’s proponents of the bio-fuel program, Capt. Samai Jai-In of the Thai Royal Navy. Capt. Samai and his group have already visited the country for this project and they will be back on July 30 for a related conference in Cebu.
Castillo hopes that before she retires, the used cooking oil project would be realized in the country. But, she quickly adds, "retirement is not in my vocabulary."
"That’s what my friends tell me, that my famous last words are ‘I will retire’ but then I don’t," she laughs.
"That’s one thing about me, I don’t like being inactive. There are a lot of things to do," says this mother of six and proud grandmother of a four-year-old boy.
"In the States, they didn’t want to believe that I am a senior citizen so I have to show my passport," she chuckles. And when foreigners are surprised that she has six grown up children, she usually jokes that she got married at the age of 10.
Her family has been supportive of her endeavors, although they do miss her baking. In 1981, she entrusted her recipe for lemon pavlova and other specialty foods to the family cook when she started teaching at Miriam College, where she became assistant chair and head of the business department until 1989.
Six years earlier, Castillo went for a masters degree in business administration at the University of the Philippines after the family returned from Boston where they stayed for three years when her husband, an investment banker, took his doctorate.
From 1992 to 1997, Castillo was busy getting her doctorate in business administration. It was when she had to come up with a thesis that she found her passion for the environment.
"I wrote about the cement sector, adopting pollution abatement equipment for the cement sector," she recalls after a friend, Grace Favila who then headed the Philippine Business the for Environment, advised her that she "could not go wrong" with environment.
It didn’t take long before Castillo, armed with extensive research on the environment, formed the Asia-Pacific Roundtable for Sustainable Consumption and Production (APRSCP), which has 29 member-countries.
APRSCP is a non-profit, nongovernment group that aims to foster dialog among industry, the academe and NGOs in the region. Originally, the focus was on cleaner production, but sustainable consumption was added with consumer behavior being part of environmental concern.
APRSCP has an ongoing project with Bayer Crop Science Philippines and its suppliers on "greening the supply chain." Castillo cites the successful example of a supplier for Bayer with a factory that was "disorderly" and lacked a healthy environment especially for its workers. By using an "integrated preventive environmental strategy," Castillo’s team managed to show the supplier that adopting a cleaner production process not only increases efficiency and reduces risks to humans and the environment, but also saves money for the company.
"The goal of clean production is to successfully deal with the causes of environmental problems at their source as opposed to pollution control and waste minimization, which merely treat the symptoms," a primer explains.
Sustainable consumption meanwhile is all about consumer education. Another example of what APRSCP does best involves a hotel in Cebu. Following the common practice of immediately serving water to customers, Castillo recalls that this particular establishment served 42 glasses of water a day.
All it took was a simple sign advising customers that, due to the scarcity of water resources, water would only be served when requested. "They ended up serving only 12 glasses of water everyday. So in a month’s time, they got to save hundreds liters of water. These are small things that make an impact," she notes.
APRSCP has come a long way in getting its message across and in wining over supporters.
"When we started we didn’t have any funds but it has become self sustaining," she says, noting they obtain funding from the ADB, UNEP, USAID, and other funding support organizations as well as private companies. "We will hold our seventh conference in Hanoi next year which will be supported by the Swiss government."
Castillo believes that awareness is key to attaining the goals toward a cleaner environment.
"From my observation throughout these years, people really have to be aware. It’s not that they don’t like or they don’t want to help or support. It’s because they don’t know. If you raise the awareness, you build their capacities and it can happen," Castillo shares.
Through networking and partnering–instead of constant bickering–misunderstandings and miscommunications among opposing groups are smoothed out, as Castillo observes from experience.
During an ADB forum, she recalls that some "violently passionate" environmental organizations called private firms "corporate monkeys."
"These ‘corporate monkeys’ partnered with them and now they are the best of friends," she says.
Another thing Castillo wants to pursue under the water agenda is wind power technology to desalinate water, like the one being used in Ilocos Norte.
"We can bring that to Cebu because of the water problem they have there," says Castillo, adding that Cebu is one of the "water critical" areas cited in the JICA study (the others are Metro Manila, Davao, Baguio, Angeles, Bacolod, Iloilo, Cagayan de Oro and Zamboanga).
The meeting in Paris this week is critical, she says, as they we will be meeting with the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), as well as the heads of the ADB, IMF, other development banks and financial institutions in the hope of getting their commitment for funding of the compendium objectives.
Castillo is also optimistic that the mandate of the water body would go beyond the term of Annan when he retires this December. The board, she says, wants the body extended until 2008, citing the water program is a long-term one.
Undaunted by the tasks she has on her hands, Castillo says her family and her relationship with God keeps her going.
"People jokingly ask me, what kind of vitamins I take," she quips. But her "secret" lies in her faith: "My network to God."
"I go to church everyday. Wherever I am, I look for a church even if I have to spend so much for my taxi and no matter how busy I get," she explains. "A $20 cab fare for God is nothing," she replied when someone pointed out to her how expensive it was to take a taxi in Kyoto.
She says she spends time with her husband and children as much as she can. She and husband recently celebrated their 39th anniversary. Being a closely-knit family, they spent it with the rest of the family in Tagaytay.
Castillo says she also finds time to be with her friends from Miriam College as well as her local and international "environmental friends".
She too has come a long way–from the kitchen to the classroom to the international stage. "I was very scared of facing people and one time at Miriam, I was made to face an audience of 700 students
