Plastic waste, from gutter to dinner table

Leo Wahyudi S, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Many might not realize that plates on which their food is served in restaurants could be made from plastic waste scavenged from the city's streets.

Plastic ware, kitchen utensils, hangers, mattresses and buckets are among those made from recycled plastic waste.

Companies buy the waste from brokers who usually buy plastic from the bosses of scavenger gangs. Each boss employs between 20 and 40 scavengers and pays them about Rp 700 per kilogram or lower depending on the kinds of plastics.

Nari, 39, who has been in the business for 12 years, said he bought material daily from scavengers.

After being sorted based on color and shape, the plastic was packed and sold to the brokers who supplied plastic factories in Greater Jakarta.

"I can supply about three tons of sorted plastic rubbish a day," Nari said on Tuesday.

He said he usually received between five percent to 20 percent of the net profit because he had only a limited market share.

Nari lives amid a pile of plastic garbage of all kinds on a 1,000 meter square plot of land in Srengseng, Kembangan subdistrict, West Jakarta.

Nurdin, 38, another scavenger boss, appeared to be running his business successfully in Srengseng Sawah, West Jakarta, saying he had a turnover of about Rp 6 million a day.

"I can deliver between six to 15 tons of sorted garbage a day to suppliers," Nurdin said, admitting that on average he could make a Rp 500,000 net profit each day.

He said that after buying the plastic wastes at the price of between Rp 100 and Rp 700 per kilogram his scavengers would sort out the plastic wastes into more or less 14 categories.

He then sold them to the manufacturers, who normally bought the raw materials for between Rp 400 and Rp 1,800 per kilogram.

They may not realize that their business has apparently helped solve the problem of trash in the city that increases every year in line with the increase in its population.

The City Sanitation Agency calculated that Jakartans disposed of about 25,650 cubic meters of garbage per day. It means that each mayoralty contributed at least 4,500 cubic meters of trash a day. There is no data on the city's plastic wastes, but its daily production has been steadily increasing.

Scavengers approximately sorted 70 percent of the waste while the remainder was not deemed recyclable.

Mujito, the Indonesian Scavenger Cooperation's chairman, estimated that there were some 130,000 scavengers in Greater Jakarta. But only 1,700 of them had joined the cooperation.

Each scavenger could collect about 14 kilograms of plastic waste per day. "So can you imagine how much of Jakarta's plastic wastes can be saved by the scavengers a day," he said.