Jakarta in need of long-term waste solution

Alex Wilson, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Last week's signing of an agreement between the Jakarta city administration and the Bekasi mayoralty means the city's rubbish disposal headaches are temporarily under control.

And so far, the massive Bantar Gebang dump site will continue to absorb most of Jakarta's waste so long as the terms of the new agreement are met.

The closure of the site late last year sent the city administration scrambling for ways to dispose of the 6,000 tons of rubbish Jakarta produces every day.

Arrangements for alternative dump sites looked shaky, and plans to ship processed waste to Bangka or purchase huge incinerators failed to address short-term problems.

The situation has focused minds on long-term solutions for a problem with serious health and safety implications.

An environmental scientist with 20 years of research experience, Sri Bebasari, of the Agency for the Assessment and Application of Technology (BPPT), has a simple mantra -- reduce, reuse and recycle -- to deal with the problem.

"We have to change our paradigm to recycle, not just to collect and dump," said the woman who reluctantly describes herself as "the queen of the rubbish heap."

While the challenges of recycling in Jakarta are huge, she said, a long-term approach must be taken.

"In Singapore, they took 30 years to reach their current situation. It's not just a matter of logistics, but a cultural matter, and one of education."

She sees integrated waste treatment as the solution -- a combination of recycling, composting, incineration, and sanitary landfills.

Waste would be separated at the source in homes and markets, and be treated on site.

The remaining waste would go into the sanitary landfill.

The landfill would have layers of sand to keep disease- carrying insects away, and pipes to expel water, along with methane gasses given off by solid wastes breaking down.

The methane gasses, which make normal landfills unsafe to rebuild on, could be used as alternative energy sources. Remaining residue from recycling and composting, meantime, would be burnt in a huge incinerator.

The obstacles to such a system being implemented in Jakarta are enormous, as is the price tag. Researchers estimate that just to design a 20-hectare sanitary landfill would cost Rp 2 billion. And this would be only 1.3 percent of the total cost of the development.

The massive incinerators, designed to minimize pollution, would have to be imported at great expense. One incinerator, capable of burning 1,000 tons per day, would cost Rp 1.2 trillion.

Expenditure of this scale would put a serious dent in the city administration's budget, Rp 8.1 trillion in 2001.

Puput Ahmad Safrudin, chairman of the Indonesian Environmental Forum (WALHI)'s Jakarta chapter, agreed that a sanitary landfill would be the best solution in the long term, but said that incinerators were not part of the solution.

"Incinerators are dangerous for respiratory disease, and research has shown they cause cancer," he said.

Recycling schemes at the neighborhood level were needed to reduce the volume of rubbish produced, but there was little support available.

"There is no political will from the local governments to operate these recycling and composting schemes," he said.

Some NGOs in Jakarta have initiated pilot recycling and composting schemes at the neighborhood level. These are based on the idea that Jakarta's waste problem should be solved at its head -- home, markets, and industries - rather than at its tail, landfills and incinerators.

Proof positive that these schemes can have an impact comes from the Philippines. Manila, which produces roughly the same amount of rubbish per day as Jakarta, experienced a serious waste disposal crisis early in 2001.

The San Mateo dump, receptacle for most of Manila's 6,000 tons per day of refuse, closed down and the planned alternative fell through.

As rubbish piled up in the streets, desperate local governments began to promote waste reduction and composting. The rubbish piles were greatly reduced; the Metropolitan Manila Development Authority (MMDA) attributed the containment of the crisis to community level recycling.

The crisis in Manila and pressure from NGOs hastened the passing of the Integrated Ecological Solid Waste Management Act.

The act mandates waste segregation at its source and requires local governments to divert 25 percent of their waste away from disposal sites through resource recovery activities within the next five years.

Eugene Bennagen, a researcher with the Economic and Environment Program for South East Asia (EEPSA) in the Philippines, said that the improvement did not last long.

"While there are some success stories of recycling and composting, the impact of these activities is far from being felt," she told The Jakarta Post by e-mail.

"The promotion of waste segregation at the source with the idea of encouraging household recycling and composition has been unsuccessful -- even with threats of fines for garbage trucks who collect unsegregated wastes," she continued.

While Jakarta and Manila continue to grapple with problems of similar dimensions, officials in the Philippines at least have legislation in place for recycling and are encouraging grassroots operations.

With large scale centralized solutions coming at a high price, small community based programs may be the long-term answer to Jakarta's rubbish dilemma.