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Indonesia Lagging Behind World in Recycling Trash
Fidelis E. Satriastanti | June 22, 2011

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tell-me-about-it
7:32am Jul 1, 2011

Simple. Do as many of the cities in the US and Europe have been doing for years. Collect the burnable trash and it all goes to the power companies to burn to make electricity. Gets rid of the trash and makes electricity less expensive. All that's left to recycle as far as trash is concerned is glass and metal.


Mike.Jkt
9:46am Jun 23, 2011

You're kidding? Until every citizen's and the government's attitudes toward recycling, Indonesia will remain a garbage dump. As a long term expatraite resident here it makes me sick to see the situation get worse in the past 25 years.

enakajah
8:54am Jun 23, 2011

What Sri Bebassari does not say about the scavengers is the appalling shanty villages they set up, the mounts of disgusting organic and other non-recycled waste that they burn off in massive piles of vastly polluting bonfires every night. There used to be such a village in front of Senopati apartments and the fires were huge, the smell sickening and the vast plumes of smoke would smother the entire area. Right next to a government office!!

Certainly formalizing the scavengers is a good idea but don't think that is enough, they need to be housed and their dumps monitored and the burning of the waste stopped. If you are going to do it do it properly and make them all city employed workers. But that will never work as most of the people do not have JKT Identity cards or any formal address or any way in which formalizing their operation would work at all. These people need to be attended to in a complete way not just from the point of view of what they actually do on the surface.

You can talk about recycling until the cows come home but it will change nothing until people are educated on waste disposal first. How many places have we all seen where everything is tossed out the back and into a river, or a vacant lot or people burn their house waste instead of paying to have it collected. The levels of education haven't reach responsible waste disposal of any sort never mind recycling.


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Even though the mantra of Reduce, Reuse, Recycle has been around for a long time now, one environmental entrepreneur argues that it has failed to ever catch on in Indonesia.

“In this country, the need to manage waste has only just entered the public conscience,” says Salam, the founder and owner of Kedai Daur Ulang [Recycle Shop] on Jalan Mampang Prapatan in South Jakarta.

“People are going: ‘Oh, I see we can now recycle paper,’ or ‘Oh, recycling is important,’ but they’re not yet at the point where they care enough about the environment to do something about it.”

He says that in the 20 years he has been in the recycling business, almost all the items brought in to his facility come from foreigners and foreign-owned companies, such as Coca-Cola. “We don’t
get much from local offices,” he says.

Besides low awareness of the need to conserve resources, another obstacle to recycling here is that most people who want to just do not know where to take their recyclables, Salam says.

“It’s become a habit for people, especially in the lower- and middle-income brackets, to leave it to the authorities to deal with waste management,” he says.

“So they just pay their monthly subscriptions to the sanitation agency to cart away their garbage for them, when in truth they can easily manage their own waste.”

Sri Bebassari, a waste management expert and chairwoman of the Indonesian Solid Waste Association (InSWA), points out that while recycling is done citywide on a daily basis, most people tend to overlook it because it is carried out by trash pickers.

These scavengers go from neighborhood to neighborhood, collecting litter and scouring trash cans and dumps for anything that can be recycled.

“Their job should be formalized because scavengers have an important duty, yet their role isn’t acknowledged,” Sri says.

“They pick up the trash every day, but there’s no health insurance for them. The Ministry of Manpower and Transmigration and Ministry of Trade should have addressed the issue of formalizing scavenging a long time ago.”

But even with the practice officially recognized, Sri says scavenging alone will not be sufficient to recycle all the trash in the city.

“Scavengers only look for certain kinds of trash: plastics, cardboard, metals,” she says.

“But there are still a lot of other types of trash that they won’t bother going for, which is where an integrated system for waste management would come in, whereby manufacturers would pay scavengers to pick up trash from products that they make.”

The idea, Sri says, is to hold manufacturers responsible for recycling the waste that they produce, such as packaging.

“If you can sell [the products], then you can buy [the waste] by-products,” she says.

Environmentalists estimate that 60 percent of the 6,000 tons of garbage collected in Jakarta each day can be recycled instead of being dumped in landfills. As much as 40 percent of the recyclable waste is paper waste, while the rest is mostly plastic.

Salam says his own facility can process up to 500 kilograms of waste paper a day, which it blends with banana tree fibers to make recycled paper. “If you can recycle a ton of paper, then you can save seven large trees from being chopped down,” he says.

“Recycling is the best, cheapest and most environmentally friendly solution for waste management. You can’t eliminate waste, you can just reduce how much of it you produce. If you burn it, then that’s causing more environmental problems. So it’s best to cut back on the amount you throw out.”

To make recycling more of a habit for city residents, Salam says it should be introduced at the neighborhood and community levels. “The city should empower local units like these because it’s not difficult to manage waste,” he says.