•    HOME   
•    NEWS   
•    BUSINESS   
•    INTERNATIONAL   
•    TECH   
•    SPORTS   
•    LIFE & TIMES   
•    OPINION   
•    MY JAKARTA   
•    BLOGS   
•    EYEWITNESS   

In the suburbs of South Jakarta, everyone knows Salam as the “Recycling Man.” It’s not because he manages Kedai Daur Ulang, one of only a handful of recycling shops in the capital, but because he has a talent for collecting old cardboard boxes and unwanted banana trees and turning them into decorative paper.

“It’s a very funny story,” Salam says, sitting at his shop in Mampang Prapatan, his desk littered with half-finished recycled gift boxes.
Nearly 25 years ago, he approached office building managers and plantation owners about taking old boxes and banana trees off their hands, “but as word caught on and other people found out that I was collecting waste materials, I started to receive banana trees and paper garbage from many different people,” he says.

Thanks to word of mouth, Salam, 43, now receives deliveries from people across the city.

“Now when people think of paper garbage or banana trees, they think of me. They say, ‘Oh, we must send it to the recycle shop because Salam will need this to make paper,’ ” he says, laughing.

But creating recycled paper is only half the story, as the walls of Salam’s shop clearly show. They are decorated with awards, photographs and memorabilia from a life that is a little more than ordinary, and about much more than just reusing paper.

“This is a photo of me protesting with Greenpeace,” he says, pointing to a small framed photograph of a young Salam, barely recognizable at a glance. He can’t recall the year, but the oversized glasses, colorful jackets and big hair scream mid-80s.
“We were in New York protesting about waste management. It was during the Green movement,” he says.

Salam started his environmental campaigning in 1983 with the Indonesian Forum for the Environment (Walhi). He worked on various green issues and traveled as far afield as New York and Berlin to increase global awareness of waste management. In 1985, Salam began campaigning about recycling, and the following year he set up the recycling shop in Mampang Prapatan along with Walhi. He now manages the operation by himself.

Recycling soon became his calling, and Salam left Walhi in 1988 to focus on his own work.

The shop became his production base and he began experimenting with making paper from recycled cardboard waste and banana trees, a process he said took two years to perfect.

The process itself sounds a bit like baking a cake.

“We collect the waste and then we blend it using a blender. We then pour the mixture into large tubs, and using a wooden frame we filter and lay out each sheet one at a time,” Salam says.

“We try to make 200 pages a day, but because we do the process by hand it can take a long time — especially when making colored paper.”

Kedai Daur Ulang sells its recycled products to individuals and businesses across the country, particularly bookstores.

Some of the profits are used to hold recycling workshops and training programs at schools.

“Many people come to buy the paper, but my vision is not just to make and sell recycled paper, but to campaign about recycling,” Salam says, “because recycling is one way of managing waste in Indonesia.”

Jakarta produces about 6,250 tons of waste a day, according to the city’s Public Works Agency. And nearly 20 percent of that garbage ends up in local rivers, canals and waterways.

So, Salam says, educating communities — especially young people — about waste management and getting them involved in recycling will help to reduce the city’s waste problems.

For Salam and his team, recycling is not just a community activity, but a family affair.

“After we do school visits, some of the children come to help make recycled paper at the shop,” he says, pointing to a young boy busy folding paper at the shop. “My family is also involved in my work. My wife and children come along to training sessions and on school visits to discuss recycling with the children and to help give out information about recycling.”

Salam acknowledges that promoting recycling has not been an easy task. “When I first started campaigning on environmental issues in the 1980s, there were a lot of objections and disinterest from the government and also the public,” he says.

“People need to understand and see that waste is not just waste, but a collection of material that has been used,” he adds. “It’s important that people in Jakarta change their perception of waste and what they do with that waste.”

Ever the optimist, Salam says there’s plenty of room for growth in the recycling industry.

“If we work together and teach people about waste management,” he says, “we can reduce the amount of waste the city has to collect each day.