What It Means
- Residents of Barangay Sinisian West in Lemery, Batangas have filed a petition alleging a DENR salvage zone violation at a private cement facility inside a P5 billion port and industrial complex.
- The facility, run by Lemery Cement Silo Tank Corp, supplies bulk cement to the Calabarzon region under the government’s ongoing infrastructure buildout.
- DENR has not inspected the site. Residents say their complaints date back more than a year.
- If confirmed, the violation could trigger daily fines and a demolition or relocation order under existing coastal easement rules.
- The case tests whether private port and industrial developments get checked before construction or only after a community organizes to force the question.
Fisherfolk and coastal residents in Lemery, Batangas have petitioned the Department of Environment and Natural Resources to investigate what they describe as a DENR salvage zone violation at a cement plant operating inside the Sinisian Lemery Batangas Port and Industrial Park. The complaint, filed through the fisherfolk group Pamalakaya after a community consultation on July 13, names noise, dust, a fishing zone closed to boats, recurring oil spills, and a seawall that residents say encroaches on the mandated coastal easement.
The plant has been running since 2025. Nobody from DENR has confirmed or denied the alleged DENR salvage zone violation yet.
A Cement Plant Built for the Infrastructure Boom
The Sinisian Lemery Batangas Port and Industrial Park is not a marginal operation. It cost more than P5 billion to build, and its owners, the Co family through COHACO Merchandising, marketed it from the start as a supply hub for cement and slag headed into Calabarzon construction projects tied to the government’s infrastructure push. Trade press covered its 2024 groundbreaking and its 2025 opening as an investment win: a deep water port capable of handling Panamax vessels, cement silos storing up to two million tons a year, an oil terminal with 170 million liters of capacity.
None of that coverage asked whether the seawall and industrial structures cleared the coastal easement that every shoreline development in the country is bound by. The question of a DENR salvage zone violation only surfaced once residents raised it themselves, more than a year after commercial operations began.
The Salvage Zone Rule Nobody Checked First
Philippine law sets aside a strip of shoreline, called the salvage zone, that private structures are not supposed to occupy. Under DENR Administrative Order 2004-24 and the Water Code, that easement runs three meters in urban areas, twenty in agricultural areas, and forty in forest areas, measured inland from the shoreline, and it exists to preserve public access, absorb storm surge, and protect coastal ecosystems. Residents allege the seawall built for the Lemery complex sits inside that zone, and that industrial structures nearby have weakened an existing catch basin, worsening flooding in surrounding communities.
A DENR salvage zone violation, if confirmed through inspection, is not a paperwork technicality. Under DAO 2021-07, a confirmed DENR salvage zone violation carries fines of five thousand to fifty thousand pesos a day and can result in an order to remove the structure entirely.
Enforcement That Waits for Someone to Ask
What makes this case structurally interesting is not the allegation itself. It is the timeline. The plant secured its permits, built its seawall, opened to the public as a regional cement supplier, and operated for more than a year before any review of a possible DENR salvage zone violation became public. DENR’s enforcement model for salvage zones is complaint driven. Nothing forces a proactive inspection at the point of construction or commissioning. The agency only moves once someone outside government raises the question loudly enough.
That pattern is not unique to Lemery. HemosPH has previously documented how selective pressure shapes which infrastructure violations actually get investigated, where enforcement follows political and public attention rather than a fixed compliance calendar. The same logic applies here. A facility built to serve a national infrastructure agenda gets built first and questioned later, and only because a fisherfolk group organized a petition drive.
The Residents Absorbing the Cost of Waiting
Residents of Sinisian West have no independent power to force an inspection into the alleged DENR salvage zone violation. They can only make enough noise that DENR chooses to act. In the meantime, they say they have lived with noise, dust linked to respiratory complaints, restricted fishing grounds, and flooding tied to a weakened catch basin, for over a year with no state review.
If DENR confirms the DENR salvage zone violation at the site, the company faces fines that scale by the day and a possible order to remove the seawall. That outcome would also expose every other privately financed port and industrial project rising along the Batangas coastline under the same investment wave. None of those projects have faced public scrutiny of their coastal easement compliance either. Lemery is simply the one where residents spoke first.
The Inquirer has sought comment from Lemery Cement Silo Tank Corp, and the company had not responded as of publication. DENR has likewise not confirmed whether or when an inspection will take place. A cement supplier built for the country’s construction pipeline keeps running on a seawall whose legal standing has never been independently checked.
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