Environmentalists eye middle class in recycling drive
The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
A car stops in front of a blue and green tent in a hypermarket's parking lot on a Saturday.
Not long afterwards, instead of loading plastic bags of shopping into her car, the driver unloads a broken rice cooker, a couple of flat tires and piles of plastic bags filled with cartons and paper cups.
"Here, how much does all of this weigh?" asked Arri, a mother of two who lives at Pondok Cabe, South Jakarta, as she handed the junk from her car to an attendant standing in front of the tent. The officer weighed then and later handed Arri a stamped form. "You can ask for the voucher inside," he said.
No. The parking lot had not been turned into a junkyard. Instead, it was part of a new environmental campaign titled"Green Cities, Green Communities", which has involved the collection of trash every Wednesday and Saturday since the middle of last month.
The campaign, which was initiated by the JDFI radio network, the city sanitation agency and two environmental organizations, is aimed at the middle class who shop in hypermarkets, and is intended to serve as an example of how the community can help ease Jakarta's waste problems.
People are encouraged to separate their non-organic waste -- ranging from paper, plastics, metals and glass to broken pieces of machinery -- from daily domestic organic waste, and to bring it to designated locations in Jakarta.
For every 50 kilograms of waste they collect, they will receive a Rp 10,000 shopping voucher.
"I heard about the program on the radio," Arri said, "and I thought, why not?"
"We have collected more than 20 tons of non-organic waste in the last three weeks," said Anom Wibisono, the program coordinator, who is a member of a non-governmental organization called Kirai.
The waste, which is collected at a number of different places around the city, is then taken to a "zero-waste" workshop in Kelapa Gading, where it is sorted out based on what it is made off.
Anom explained that separating non-organic from organic waste facilitated the recycling process for materials that did not easily decay.
"Jakarta produces some 6,000 tons of waste every day," he said. "With the waste already separated, it does not have to be piled up. We can avoid environmental problems as we can quickly allow the organic waste to decompose and recycle the non- organic."
In the "zero-waste" workshop, which is located behind a scavengers' settlement in North Jakarta, Anom and his staff turn old newspapers into recycled paper and empty bottles into table decorations.
However, due to a lack of funding and electricity, the recycling program has been temporarily halted. It is set to start again in August.
The green campaign, which has been going on for almost a month, has had an enthusiastic response with a weekly average of 25 people depositing their non-organic garbage at each of the six appointed spots.
"We will continue this until December and then see whether we should expand it or not," Anom said.
Meanwhile, Arri has trained her family to dispose of their garbage in two separate trash cans at home -- one for organic and one for non-organic waste. "It was really simple once we got used to it," she said.
"And after we started separating the waste, we found we were producing more non-organic waste than organic waste," Arri said. (003)