Sorting household garbage expensive

Damar Harsanto, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

The city administration could save as much as Rp 140 billion annually from the current budget allocation of Rp 200 billion for garbage management, if families separate their household garbage before it is collected.

Sri Bebassari, the head of the Center for Assessment and Application of Environmental Technology at the Agency for the Assessment and Application of Technology (BPPT), said on Sunday: "The process of sorting waste ideally starts from home. Otherwise, the sorting process takes the lion's share, or 70 percent, of the spending in garbage management which is what is happening currently."

Sri said the high costs were due to time consuming separation and the sheer number of people employed to sort the waste.

"Just figure out how long we must spend and how many people must work to sort one truck of waste?"

Jakarta produces an average of 26,000 cubic meters of trash per day.

Sorting trash at homes could be important in speeding up the garbage processing time and thereby avoiding some environmental damage, she added. Garbage needs to be sorted into organic, inorganic and hazardous waste.

"The major problems lie with the culture, the political will and public awareness to deal with the garbage," Sri said. She lambasted people living in luxury housing estates who still handled their waste poorly.

But an official at the City Sanitation Agency, who spoke on condition of anonymity, differed with Sri's statement. The official revealed that the trash sorting process would come to no avail because there was no system in place to deal with the pre- sorted trash.

"If everybody handles the trash by themselves, the pre-sorted trash will still be mixed at Bantar Gebang dump anyway," the official said.

The official, however, admitted that sorting the trash was important to boost efficiency in garbage management.

"But, we only have less than Rp 200 million to finance the campaign for the public to start sorting their own garbage at homes," the official grumbled.

As part of the public campaign for sorting the waste, 1,930 scouts joined the campaign Sunday morning by cleaning up the mounting garbage in the Cengkareng area of West Jakarta.

The scouts did not only pick up the trash but also sorted it in three separate containers. Organic waste was put into green plastic bags, inorganic trash, like plastic bottles and cans, was placed in yellow bags while hazardous trash, including used batteries, was put into red plastic bags.

Mansyur, a 16-year-old Scout, welcomed the program as he reckoned it would help relieve the garbage problems in Jakarta.

"The protracted and tough talks about Bantar Gebang dump site in Bekasi and the recent flooding which hit the capital in January and February clearly indicate the city administration's lack of serious concern to cope with the garbage problem," he said.

Mansyur recalled his fresh experience on Saturday when a number of high school students attended a workshop in observance of Earth Day.

"I criticized the administration's poor handling of the garbage. But our teachers took sides with the officials and they would not let us debate the issue. They 'won', not due to rational reasoning, but because of their authoritarian way of thinking," he said.

The national scouts movement's chairman, Parni Hadi, said the program, which began in March in Senen, Central Jakarta, was aimed at educating the youngsters to process garbage into something useful. The campaign will be continued next month in another part of the city.