'Handle your own garbage'

'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.