'Handle your own garbage'

Annastashya Emmanuelle, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Increasing the awareness of residents and encouraging individual initiatives to maintain a clean and healthy environment could become an alternative option to handle waste, instead of relying on the City Sanitary Agency, who claim to lack the resources to handle garbage effectively, says an expert in the field.

Households could begin by developing a habit of separating organic and nonorganic waste, so that the sanitary agency would only have to collect the organic trash to be processed at the city's garbage dumping site, according to the head of Human Resources and Environmental Research (PSDML) at the University of Indonesia, Setyo Sarwanto.

"To help, residents could be encouraged to be more disciplined in handling their own waste, making a habit of separating their garbage before piling it up in front of their houses," he told The Jakarta Post last weekend.

In this way, Setyo said, the sanitary agency would only have to collect organic waste and process it at the city's trash dumping site, which currently uses the sanitary landfill system.

At the moment, garbage at Bantar Gebang, the city's dumping site in Bekasi, is separated by scavengers.

According to Setyo, the government's campaign on garbage- handling is ineffective because it is based on a centralized government program and not on public initiatives to create a clean environment.

"Ideally, the garbage campaign should be initiated by residents themselves based on their own motivation," he said.

The City Sanitary Agency has allocated Rp 90 billion in handling garbage for this year, a sum Setyo considers sufficient to manage the city's household garbage of 25,000 cubic meters a day.

"However, there must be strict control of the budget in order to have it implemented effectively," he commented.

About 2,000 cubic meters of the garbage can not be transported to Bantar Gebang, due to lack of garbage trucks, according to the sanitary agency.

The city administration accounted last month that the plan to buy eight large garbage trucks and 10 pickup trucks for the public order office was postponed because the funds allocated for the vehicles were used to pay for 55 sedans and five buses for city councillors.