'Garbage will remain a headache'

In observance of World Environment Day on June 5, The Jakarta Post interviewed some people about the public's awareness of the need to conserve natural resources. Some of them shared their views on the importance of minimizing household waste by encouraging recycling.

Mutiara, 25, is an employee at the Islamic State University in Ciputat, South Jakarta. She lives with her parents in Bogor:

I think we will continue to have problems with the current disastrous garbage and pollution situations if we keep thinking they way we do now. Many of us still believe that garbage is not an our immediate concern, and that we can throw away whatever we want as there will always be a garbage collector to take it away.

In my view, recycling will not help a lot as only some kinds of garbage can be recycled with our current technology. So, unless we have technology that can recycle everything, then we will have to change our mindset to be able to minimize the amount of garbage we produce.

So, how can we hope to deal with garbage using environmentally friendly methods -- such as separating organic and inorganic waste in our own homes -- if we don't even think we have a garbage problem?

Chicha, 24, works for a non-governmental organization in Central Jakarta. She lives with her parents in Duren Tiga, South Jakarta:

I think we have a problem with garbage and the environment as our legal system doesn't encourage people to deal with their own trash wisely.

As we know, households produce much more garbage than industry, but households are never punished for that.

All of our law enforcers focus on industry as they are the big fish, and automatically lead to a lot of publicity if the law enforcers succeed in uncovering, for instance, environmental crimes by a company. In addition, I am concerned that there is a lot of scope for bribery when law enforcers are dealing with firms.

Basically, I think we can prevent environmental problems being caused by industry as long as our law enforcers are not corrupt. But how can we deal with the problems resulting from household waste if we don't start reducing the amount of garbage we produce or start recycling it?

--The Jakarta Post