MANILA — President Rodrigo Duterte has given Canada a May 15 deadline to take back tons of trash mistakenly sent to the Philippines several years ago, saying he will ship the garbage back if the Canadians do not comply.

“If they cannot get that, then we will be shipping them out and throw them to the shores or beaches of Canada,” a presidential spokesman, Salvador Panelo, said in a statement.

The trash arrived in 2013 and 2014 in more than 100 containers delivered from Canada by a private Canadian company and marked as recyclable scrap. But dozens of the containers held used adult diapers, household garbage, plastic bags and other waste.

The Canadian government has said that it is working on resolving the dispute. It amended environmental laws in 2016 to set liability for private companies in such cases and to compel them to take back the waste.