Jakarta deals with waste crisis as garbage piles up
Print Edition
Sifting through a mountain of garbage with her bare hands, a thick cloth wrapped around her face to keep out the stench, Patimah recalled her early days scavenging at a dump on the outskirts of Jakarta the size of 120 football fields.
“I vomited back then,” she said while wading through knee-deep waste, swatting away flies as she hunted for plastic bottles amid food scraps and soiled clothing.
But now Patimah, who like many Indonesians goes by one name, said the smell no longer bothers her: “I am used to it.”
The same cannot be said for people living nearby, who are increasingly angry at the odors wafting from the tip, placing it at the center of a row that highlights the challenge for Jakarta and other developing cities in dealing with their waste.
Virtually all rubbish from Jakarta — a sprawling city of about 10 million with a booming middle class — is dumped an hour’s drive away at Bantar Gebang, in the city of Bekasi, where towering mountains of trash have risen skyward as the capital grows bigger and wealthier.
The absence of a citywide recycling scheme, and limited public awareness of “going green,” means the tip — already one of the world’s largest — is growing by an estimated 6,500 tons per day. The job of sorting through the mountains of untreated waste falls to a 6,000-strong army of trash pickers, including many young children, who dodge heavy machinery and exposure to disease to eke out a living from the city’s filth.
In November, the road to Bantar Gebang was blocked for days by angry residents, triggering a crisis as trucks backed up for miles and trash collection points quickly reached capacity. The standoff dominated local headlines until Jakarta’s governor finally ordered police to escort the trucks to the dumpsite. But the issue is far from resolved and highlights a perennial problem facing many developing cities.
The head of Jakarta’s public sanitation agency, Isnawa Adji, knows the city cannot rely on Bantar Gebang forever, and says authorities plan to build several world-class waste treatment facilities at significant cost to boost recycling and incinerate trash.
“The public aren’t educated about this,” he said, referring to the “reduce, reuse, recycle” signs outside his office. “The most effective change begins in the home.”
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