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Like most urban dwellers, Jakartans want nothing to do with garbage. They don’t want it in their homes, in their hands or even in plain sight. That might explain why the city’s streets, rivers, canals, roads and underpasses are full of solid waste — but all that trash only comes back to haunt city residents because garbage is a major cause of flooding and a source of contaminated drinking water.

But the residents of Neighborhood Unit 3 in Rawajati, South Jakarta, are the exception. “We need more waste,” said Ninik Nuryanto, head of the local women’s association.

Since 2004, residents of Rawajati have been processing domestic waste into organic fertilizer. In the beginning, the fertilizer was just for personal use, a way to help cultivate the flowers in their front yards. But eventually, production exceeded demand, so they started selling it.

The business is a hit. The women’s association makes about Rp 800,000 ($79) a month selling bags of fertilizer, plus Rp 20 million a month hawking flower seeds, plants and trees. Buyers come back because the fertilizer is both of good quality and cheaper than other brands. And the community reaps the benefits.

The money raised from the association’s sales goes into its administrative fund, which it uses for public services such as paving roads, building sewage canals and even setting aside land for a park. As people from other neighborhoods began visiting Rawajati, which lies on the south side of the Ciliwung River, to enjoy the scenery, it dawned on the locals that they had created an agritourism attraction.

Just across the river, however, in the Cililitan Kecil kampong, it’s quite a different story. Boxes and bags of trash are piled up or scattered on the riverbank, just waiting for rainwater to push it into the Ciliwung River. Solid waste bobs in the water that communities up and down the river use for cleaning, bathing and washing clothes.

The 3,000 families of the kampong dump their garbage on the riverbank every day. With no trash removal service, towers of rotting garbage are picked through by alley cats, stray dogs and rats before being blown into the water or pushed in by the rain.

“We don’t have other any place to dispose of our waste but here,” complained Busoro, the head of Cililitan Kecil’s Neighborhood Unit 16. “Now it’s even worse because someone bought some of the land here, so our dump site is smaller.”

With the access road to the makeshift garbage pile so narrow that trucks are unable to remove the waste, Busoro said only pemulung (trash scavengers) can get through with their small carts to search for usable items. He added that a local city-run waste station, which is three kilometers away, was just too far. “Going to the station just to dump a plastic bag of waste is very tiring. No one here will go there,” he said.

Lack of waste disposal sites is a major problem in Jakarta. The population of around nine million people produces about 6,250 tons of waste a day, according to the city’s Public Works Department. Jakarta has only 1,200 waste drop-off stations and two landfills outside the city limits in Bekasi and Tangerang.

According to Endang Setyaningrum, head of the sub-directorate of Settlement Health Services at the Ministry of Public Works, the typical excuse is that the city government doesn’t have enough money to open more waste stations. But in reality, as Endang puts it, “The Jakarta administration doesn’t have an incentive when it comes to waste. They continue to spend budget allocations on waste without earning income from it.”

The Jakarta administration has the responsibility of hauling the garbage from the waste stations to the landfills, but it only does so once a week. “Ideally, waste should be taken from the waste stations twice a day. But with the administration having only 851 trucks, they can hardly do it,” said Wahyu Pujiastuti, head of Jakarta’s sanitation technology division, adding that the fleet is also aging.

Endang said there are garbage removal fees to be earned from residents of housing complexes and middle and upper-class neighborhoods. But instead of going into the city government coffers, private companies collect the garbage of the well-heeled for a fee and dump it at the public waste stations free of charge. “Some of them might also dump waste illegally on abandoned land and other places,” she said, because that is easier than getting through traffic to dump their collection at the waste stations and they save money on gasoline.

This adds up to an environmental disaster. Risyana Sukarma, a water and environment consultant for the World Bank, said that nearly 20 percent of the city’s daily waste ends up in local rivers, canals and waterways, reducing their ability to handle floodwater and drainage by as much as 50 percent. The foul-smelling, polluted waters also cause health problems for people who use the rivers for bathing and washing clothes.

“When you see all these problems, you feel desperate,” said Risyana, who used to work at the Ministry of Public Works. “You have to be patient because you work in Indonesia.”

In Cililitan Kecil, where nobody — public or private — picks up the trash, it all piles up quickly. When heavy rains fall, the mini-mountains of waste wash into the Ciliwung River. Inevitably, the water rises, inundating neighborhoods along both sides of the river, including the homes of the entrepreneurial trash recyclers of Rawajati across the way.

“We are often flooded even worse than the kampong across the river, because our land lies on a lower plain then theirs,” said Awarso, a resident of Rawajati.

Unfortunately, the recycling ethos of Rawajati is highly unusual in Jakarta. The majority of riverside slums and neighborhoods use the river as a toilet, shower, laundry room and trash can.

The suffering Ciliwung hasn’t been dredged in decades and no one takes ownership of the river. Endang said that river dredging is the Jakarta administration’s responsibility. However, Wahyu said that it falls under the authority of the Ministry of Public Works. “They should get on with it,” Wahyu said.

Endang said private initiatives, like Rawajati’s cottage industry, would go a long way to solving the waste problem, but “neighborhoods with high environmental awareness like Rawajati make up less 2 percent of Jakarta’s riverside dwellers. We need more neighborhoods like Rawajati in Jakarta.”

Actually, the city, and the entire country for that matter, could benefit from a massive public awareness campaign about the social, environmental and economic consequences of littering, a technique that has had some success in Western countries.
“It goes back to social lifestyle,” said Sarwo Handhayani, assistant secretary for development in the Jakarta administration. “You have to change people’s mind-sets.”

In addition, there’s no incentive for city dwellers to change their habits. Often, no one will come to remove their garbage and no one enforces a city regulation that prohibits dumping anything into the city’s waterways.

“The law is there, but without effort and real measures to enforce it, it’s all in vain,” Endang said. “No one goes to court for throwing trash into the river. No truck driver is arrested for dumping trash into the river.”

Building landfills in each of Jakarta’s five districts might be one solution, but Endang said this is unlikely because there is no room for them. Provincial and local governments outside the city are unlikely to welcome a landfill in their backyard, but in any event, they are as guilty as Jakartans in dumping their waste in rivers.

Meanwhile, in Rawajati, a community park hosts a huge display of teak tree seeds, flowers and packages of fertilizer, a symbol of what can be done with something as unglamorous as waste. Since 2006, the neighborhood has received large orders for seeds and fertilizer from central government agencies including the Forestry Ministry, which means this village wants more trash to meet demand.

So well managed is the waste that neighborhood houses divide it into two buckets: non-plastics, mainly biodegradable waste including old vegetables and food, and man-made plastic waste, which is removed and resold by garbage scavengers. The organic waste goes into fertilizer production while the men from the neighborhood administration take the plastic to a waste processing plant next to the park. Every day, 70 people, mostly women, are involved in this processing operation, which provides more jobs — as well as clean homes.

Meanwhile, walk through Rawajati and look at what you don’t see — no garbage clogging drainage ditches. No mounds of trash waiting to pollute the river. This is a lesson worth learning.