City to let subdistricts manage their own waste
Damar Harsanto, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
To reduce the burden of handling over than 6,000 tons of daily waste, the City Sanitation Agency said on Wednesday that it would authorize subdistricts to handle their own waste management and treatment.
The agency's head Rama Boedi said at City Hall that the policy emulated a system applied in some cities in South Korea and the People's Republic of China.
"We're preparing a gubernatorial decree to enforce it which is expected to take full effect by mid-2006," he said.
In the plan, each of the city's 267 subdistricts could cooperate with private companies to manage their garbage using any technology they deemed suitable.
"For some subdistricts in South Jakarta where most of the garbage could be turned into compost, we could apply composting technology. However, for other areas, we could use other technology. The principle is how to reduce, reuse or recycle the waste we have," Rama said.
As a measure to reduce the volume of waste, the agency also plans to place machines, which could compress trash, at several densely populated subdistricts in order to ease transportation to the dump.
Rama played down remarks that the machines would be a nuisance to the neighborhood in the vicinity.
"Garbage men will collect the waste from the households with their carts in the evening and bring the garbage directly to a closed chamber of the machine in which the garbage would be sprayed with liquid disinfectant to reduce the odor before being compressed," he explained.
According to him, the compression system that has been applied on a larger scale in Sunter, North Jakarta, would be able to reduce the volume of the waste by 20 percent so that it would help alleviate the volume of garbage being disposed of at Bantar Gebang dump in Bekasi.
In the past three years, the administration has been struggling to get out of its 15-year dependency on the dump by reducing the waste it dumps there amid strong rejection from the locals. Local residents around the dump have complained of worsening environment quality because of poor waste management.
It was the opposition from the locals, which resulted in the temporary closure of the dump early in 2002 and caused a chronic waste crisis, leaving mounds of garbage littering street corners.
Its efforts to work with private company PT Wira Guna Sejahtera to incinerate the trash at the Bojong plant in Bogor also hit a serious snag due to strong rejection from the local residents.
Governor Sutiyoso said that his administration was working on a new master plan for a comprehensive waste treatment system in the city.
"The master plan will become a reference for the waste treatment system in every municipality here ... We will start developing high-tech waste treatment next year," Sutiyoso said last month.
The administration claimed that some 10 local as well foreign companies had expressed interest in cooperating with the administration in some waste treatment projects.
This year, the sanitation agency has allocated a total of Rp 400 billion to finance its projects.