City to have five waste treatment facilities
Damar Harsanto, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
Aside from decentralizing waste treatment to the subdistrict level, the city administration plans to build five medium-scale waste treatment facilities, including incinerators, to handle Jakarta's daily 6,000 tons of garbage.
The 2005-2015 Action Plan produced by the Jakarta Sanitation Agency, which has been made available to The Jakarta Post, shows that the five facilities, with each able to process up to 1,500 tons of waste per day, will each be responsible for handling waste in one of five service areas in the capital - West, North, South, East and the Thousand Islands Regency.
"The development of medium-scale waste treatment facilities is based on geographical considerations and transportation efficiency," the document says.
The first two facilities will be in Duri Kosambi in West Jakarta and Marunda in North Jakarta. The facility in Duri Kosambi is expected to start operating next year, while the Marunda facility will be built between 2007 and 2010.
The agency has yet to determine the locations for three other facilities to process waste in the southern and eastern parts of the capital, and the Thousand Islands regency.
The three facilities will be built during the second phase of the plan between 2010 and 2015.
Each facility will treat waste from one municipality only, except Central Jakarta, which may choose to have waste treated by facilities in East, West, North or South Jakarta.
So, when the Duri Kosambi waste treatment is completed in 2006, only the waste from West Jakarta municipality will be taken to the plant, while other municipalities will continue to dump their garbage at Bantar Gebang, Bekasi.
A team from the administration has shortlisted five out of 123 firms that expressed interest in establishing the facilities.
The Jakarta Sanitation Agency said that it would also direct every subdistrict to carry out waste treatment measures to help minimize waste through what are dubbed "3R" activities -- reduce, reuse and recycle.
"Hopefully, we can go ahead with the implementation of the program by mid-2006," agency head Rama Boedi said.
He said that his agency was drafting a gubernatorial decree to give more power to subdistrict heads to handle waste in their own areas, emulating a similar system applied in some cities of South Korea and the People's Republic of China.
Jakarta has a total of 267 subdistricts.
City Secretary Ritola Tasmaya said that the existence of medium-scale waste treatment facilities and waste treatment at the subdistrict level would significantly reduce the dependence of the capital on the Bantar Gebang dump in Bekasi, West Jakarta.
"We hope that we can quickly bring the prolonged waste crisis in the capital to an end," he told the Post over the weekend.
For the past three years, the Jakarta administration has been struggling to escape from its 15-year-long dependency on the Bantar Gebang dump by reducing the volume of waste it dumps there amid mounting problems in its operation due to strong opposition from local people, who have complained of worsening environment quality because of poor waste management.
It was opposition from the locals that resulted in the temporary closure of the dump early in 2002 and plunged the capital into a chronic waste crisis, leaving mounds of garbage littering the streets.
Meanwhile, the establishment of an incinerator by private sector firm PT Wira Guna Sejahtera at Bojong in Bogor has also run into trouble, once again due to strong opposition from local people.
The city sanitation agency has been allocated a budget of Rp 400 billion for this year.