Bogor mayor calls for more composting efforts
Theresia Sufa, Bogor
Mayor Diani Budiarto has urged Bogor people to produce more compost from organic household waste as part of the effort to ease the municipality's waste woes.
"The administration has not enough people or facilities to handle the waste ... we need public support, not only through keeping the city clean and separating organic and nonorganic waste, but also through producing compost.
"As regards its economic value, a sufficient supply of compost can also support organic agriculture, which is now being promoted with the city limits," Diani said during his address to a seminar on waste management held on Thursday.
The seminar was attended by officials, the chief executives of subdistrict and district administrations, representatives of state forestry enterprises, environmental watchdogs, and fertilizer producers from Bogor and the neighboring town of Cianjur, both in West Java.
Bogor is one of the administrations, besides Jakarta and a number of other municipalities in West Java, that has been receiving grants to encourage compost production from the World Bank since 2002. The money is channeled through the Office of the State Minister for the Environment.
The Office of the State Minister has set a production target of 60,000 tons of compost for West Java in 2005.
"If we cannot meet the target by that time, the subsidies, which total Rp 90 billion (US$9.67 million), will be withdrawn by the World Bank and given to another country. But if we are successful, the subsidies will be extended until 2009," Diani added.
Bogor has centralized its compost production at the Galuga dump in Leuwiliang, which produces about 20 tons of compost per day. Meanwhile, local people produce about 2,100 cubic meters of waste per day.
Djawahir, a compost producer from Cisarua, asserted that the subsidies had made it easier for producers to sell their compost on the market.
He said that small-scale producers who could only produce one or two tons of compost per day received a subsidy of Rp 350 for each kilogram of the product, while mid-range producers with a capacity of between two and three tons per day received Rp 300, and large-scale producers, who produced five tons or more per day, received Rp 200 per kilo.
"The low price of compost definitely benefits the producers, farmers and other users," Djawahir remarked.
Another attendee at the seminar, E. Aritonang, a director of PT Trihandal Pancatama, a company that converts compost into granules, blamed the administration and the Office of the State Minister for not widely disseminating information on the special scheme to compost producers.
"Many compost producers don't even know about the subsidy, while we need as much compost as we can get our hands on to produce the granules, which are mostly used by mining firms," he said.
Aritonang revealed that transnational mining company Freeport imported 30,000 tons of granules per year from China to neutralize tailings at their mines in Indonesia so that the land could be restored to its original condition.
"It's ironic that this company has to import the material even though we have great potential for producing compost here."