Technical woes delay dump opening
Damar Harsanto, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
The opening of a high-tech waste treatment facility in Bojong, Klapanunggal subdistrict, Bogor, has been delayed for at least two months as the operator clears up technical problems.
"The waste treatment operating company needs more time to finish all the technical preparations to ensure that the facility can run perfectly from the start of its full operation," city spokesman Muhayat said on Tuesday.
Muhayat said the problems included financial constraints faced by the company in procuring conveyor belts to select the garbage to be processed by the bale presses at the facility.
Muhayat was speaking after a meeting at City Hall between Jakarta Governor Sutiyoso, City Sanitation Agency head Selamat Limbong and the board of directors of the waste treatment facility operator, PT Wira Guna Sejahtera.
The company earlier promised the Bojong facility would be fully operational by the middle of March.
PT Wira president director Sofyan Hadiwijaya said the facility had to separate organic waste from inorganic waste because the bale presses could only process inorganic waste.
"In the waste treatment process abroad, inorganic waste and organic waste come in separately. Here, we have more work to do as people mix both types of waste," he said.
He also said the humidity here made the garbage watery and more difficult to process.
At the Bojong facility, solid waste will be pressed while liquid waste will first be neutralized using fermentation technology. According to Sofyan, organic waste will be burned to ash and inorganic waste will be pressed into bales.
The facility has been in a trial period since early February, causing protests by residents concerned by pollution from the dump.
In an apparent effort both to calm the protests by residents and to separate the garbage, Sofyan said the facility had hired about 1,000 residents from the three subdistricts nearest the dump.
In a labor-intensive process, the workers will line up on both sides of the 33-meter-long conveyor belts and separate by hand the organic and inorganic waste for further processing.
Expected to be fully operational by June, the facility will be capable of processing about 2,000 tons of garbage a day, or one- third of Jakarta's total daily waste of 6,000 tons.
Garbage has become a serious problem in Jakarta since the repeated closures of the Bantar Gebang dump in Bekasi in response to protests by residents. The Bekasi dump has been used by Jakarta for 15 years.
Besides PT Wira Guna Sejahtera, eight other investors have signed memorandums of understanding with the administration on various garbage projects. However, the investors have complained of financial constraints that are preventing them from realizing the projects.