Each year, the sea returns what the land has discarded — and on September 19th, more than a thousand residents of Zamboanga City answered that reckoning along RT Lim Boulevard, pulling a full ton of plastic and refuse from the shoreline on International Coastal Cleanup Day. The event was both an act of collective conscience and a mirror held up to the systems that made such labor necessary. City officials now look beyond the single Saturday of effort, pressing existing ordinances against single-use plastics and for mandatory waste segregation as the more durable response to a problem that no c