City to let subdistricts manage their own waste
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.