Jakarta's Wasteland

Squandered. Misused. Unproductive. Worthless. These are all synonyms of waste. While in America we're having our fashionable conundrums about our discarded containers of capitalism, elsewhere in the world, trash is considered by some to be a status symbol.

 
Last semester, my TEFL counterpart and I taught a week’s worth of lessons on waste and sustainability. We had our students collect samples from trash bins around the school and line up according to their predicted timelines for their item’s decomposition rate. After revealing how close or far off their predictions were, we presented a PowerPoint on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an enormous vortex of marine debris floating in the North Pacific Ocean that covers an area somewhere between the size of Texas and a whole 8% of the Pacific Ocean. I included in this PowerPoint a graph that showed Indonesia as being the second largest contributor of ocean plastics in the world, right behind China.

Granted, the study is from 2010 (led by a scientist from my alma mater - UGA!) but Indonesia is still often quoted as being in the top five countries who contribute the most ocean plastic.

I was concerned before class that in giving this depressing presentation on waste mismanagement I would come off as the hypocritical foreigner barging in with reprimands, telling them that their country has a trash problem when the United States is among the top five producers of waste in the world, behind China, Brazil, Japan and Germany. However, I quickly discovered that my concerns were misplaced. When my counterpart and I translated the graph into Indonesian, our students surprised us by…. applauding. I looked to my counterpart, Miss Euis, to make sure there wasn't a mistranslation. She laughed along with them and said facetiously, "hooray, we are the winners!" Responding to the look of utter bewilderment on my face, she explained that our students were probably just excited to hear that Indonesia is known for something. In part, it may have been ironic applause from high schoolers who have grown cynical about the state of the world that the preceding generation has left them, but something that one of my students said that day in class has stuck with me ever since. He said, "It means we're rich."

It is telling of the eco-conscious American middle-class culture I grew up in that I had never before considered that the amount of trash one leaves at the curb (or in their yards to be burned, as was the case in Indonesia) could be interpreted as a symbol of wealth. In other words, that having more trash is thought of as desirable, something to show off to your neighbors. I thought of America, where even gas and petroleum industries attempt to greenwash their products in order to cultivate a positive social image in the public eye. Here, there was none of that.

While my home state of Georgia may not be a paragon of progress when it comes to waste diversion and reduction programs, I still learned at an early age the virtues of recycling and bringing reusable bags to the grocery store. In my socio-economic group, these practices corresponded directly with one’s social capital.

In Indonesia, a mismanagement of landfills and the absence of formal waste diversion programs has led the country to the brink of a state of national emergency, according to the Director of Solid Waste Management in the Republic of Indonesia, Ir. R. Sudirman. The people who recycle are individuals who do so out of necessity, like independent trash pickers who roam the streets with large baskets or sacks on their backs, gathering plastics and aluminum to sell. They are the unsung heroes of waste management in Indonesia.

My school's trash dump and one of the men (not contracted) who comes by semiweekly to pick out sellable recycling.

More unsettling than the lack of a formal waste management program is the reverence of western culture that I have observed, especially when it comes to accumulating stuff. When people in the town I live in talk about wanting to see more development in their city, development is synonymous with supply of goods and the ability to consume higher quality products. America gets the most time in world news and has the biggest economy. When Indonesians watch America's consumer-driven media it’s easy to conclude that in order for Indonesia to be more developed, its citizens need to consume more stuff. Like America does.

Take cars for example. Cars are every bit the status symbol in Indonesia that they are in America. Even if the notoriously fuel-inefficient SUVs have started drawing judgmental stares from sane members of the population in America, it's as if they were at the peak of their popularity here. My male counterpart, Pak Yayat, who drives an SUV, was the one to retrieve me from a hotel in Bandung when my group first arrived in West Java. Whenever there's a need for a car, he always drives. As we were driving to his sister's wedding, he pointed out his house as we passed it. He commented that he chose to have a big car rather than a big house. I said offhandedly, but you can't sleep in a car, to which he replied, sure you can! He added, having a big car is better because everyone will know that you have money.

But while Americans talk about saving energy and biking to work, these habits are ridiculed in the smaller towns in Indonesia because that's already the norm. With power outages quite frequently blacking out the city both inside and outside of the rainy season, sitting in the dark is definitely not a way to impress your neighbors. And only those too poor to buy a motorcycle or the very random guy decked out in a cyclist uniform (or me, that stray American volunteer) ride a bicycle around town. Even my students who live right down the street hop on their motorcycles to travel the few hundred yards to school. 

I recently asked some of my students what they thought was the biggest issue facing Karawang and they said, "a lack of facilities." When asked to elaborate on what kind of facilities, they told me that they were concerned about a lack of management from the local government for things like trash pick-up or road up-keep. In my two years living on the rural outskirts of an industrial city, the only "management" of waste I've seen apart from burning trash piles and, of course, non-contracted trash pickers, was a "clean the city" day last May where a throng of students and community groups gathered downtown and went on a big march through the main (cleanest) streets of central Karawang, playing trash picker for a day and delivering frequent updates to Instagram and Twitter.

I'm still not used to seeing kids throw their trash right out of public transportation, maybe even at some pedestrian's feet. It doesn't matter if a trash can is within arm’s reach and you're in someone else's house; trash is discarded wherever you happen to be standing and this behavior is reinforced from birth. I still cringe when I throw my biweekly garbage right in my host family's front yard to be burned, but the fact remains that there is no other place to put it. (And if breathing the acrid smoke from your burning pads and tampons isn't a good enough motivator to invest in reusable menstrual products, I don't know what is). I am mesmerized by the river of trash flowing by my school: muddy, wide and blooming with bright tropical plastic colors. At first, I associated all these behaviors and sights with an ignorance of the big environmental picture but that is not the real problem. 

Big-picture organizations in the larger cities are trying to get laws passed so that the government will regulate waste more effectively. Greeneration Indonesia is a group that launched a highly successful campaign in 2010 to require local retailers to simply ask customers if they wanted a plastic bag or not, instead of automatically giving them one. Diet Kantong Plastik (Plastic Bag Diet) is an international campaign that was launched last month in seven cities across Indonesia requiring retailers to charge a 200-rupiah (about 1 cent) tax per plastic bag. It was originally supposed to be 23 cities who would pilot the bag tax program on February 21st, National Waste Awareness Day, but other cities ended up postponing or withdrawing for unmentioned reasons. In fact, even in those seven cities, it doesn't sound like many retailers enforced the tax. Bureaucracy and unwillingness on the part of the retailers to make faithful customers pay a measly 200 rupiah for their plastic bag continues to clog the system of change, much like plastic bags clog all the sewers.

This is the sign that sits in local convenience stores informing customers about the plastic bag tax and encouraging them to bring reusable bags.

Packaging is something that my dad, a national expert on product policy, was especially keen to learn about while visiting me last July during Ramadan. In an eco-lodge in Southern Kalimantan where we stayed on the eve of our four-day tour of Tanjung Puting National Park, we spoke with an activist who said that it has only been in the last 10 years that people have switched from using banana leaves to plastic for food packaging. Plastic is being sold to us (all of us, the world over) as modern, convenient and, ironically, more hygienic, despite all the dangerous chemicals that seep into our food through plastic. There was an article in the Seattle Times recently that explained that the success of selling Tupperware in Indonesia to middle-class housewives is due to exploiting the Indonesian tradition of social gatherings.

It doesn't matter that banana leaves have many superior qualities to plastic - besides being biodegradable, they're aromatic, antioxidant, anti-bacterial and it means you don't have to wash your dishes! - plastic manufacturers prey on the desires of lower-income countries for modernity and have established their place in Indonesia and in all our minds as the superior packaging method.  

I didn't have my own picture on hand but this is a common enough sight still in many places, although it is already being replaced by Styrofoam, plastic bags and waxed paper wrapping.

So what is the big problem with trash in Indonesia anyway? Why all the fuss if people are used to it and have their own systems in place for dealing with it (i.e. burning it or leaving it out for the trash pickers who earn Rp. 500,000/month, ~$38 per month or about $1 per day, to sort through). Last Sunday I had the opportunity to answer this question.

The problem starts here, with this and other trash cans like it (so seldomly seen anywhere except for in big cities like Jakarta) that advertise a sorting process for trash. Before we even leave this trash can, I'd like to say that the contents of these two receptacles and others like them are identical. This so-called sorting is a farce.

Once sanitation workers take the contents of these receptacles to a temporary trash disposal site (TPS), the waste is then picked up by one of many licensed contractors in orange trucks, who take it hour away to another town called Bekasi, home of the largest landfill in Southeast Asia and Jakarta's controversial dumping grounds.

Last Sunday I had the opportunity to visit Jakarta's landfill, Bantar Gebang, with an Australian-Indonesian group that teaches once a week at a primary school situated inside the landfill. The group was started earlier this year by an Australian working for the UN who comes around to hostels to recruit native speakers to join the English lessons and take a tour of the landfill (suggested donation, including a home-cooked lunch and transportation is 150k rupiah; the extra money goes to the school).

One girl from Holland and two guys from California came on the Sunday tour with me. The children all live at the landfill.

Lady of the Flies.

Flies swarm around students as they copy notes.

I sweat a lot in Indonesia but rarely have I sweat like I did during my visit to Bantar Gebang. Due to the mountains of steaming garbage looming over everything, the air was both putrid and about 15-20 degrees hotter than the relatively cool 90 Fahrenheit in the city. Even my rainy season cold, which has dulled the smell of notoriously smelly fruits such as jackfruit and durian, could not entirely block out the smell of this dump site. 

Me and my two hand-holders posing in front of the trash mountain opposite the school.

An example of the incredible biodiversity in the landfill.

Giant blue caterpillar that scared the kids off.

The catch-22 is that since many people's livelihoods depend on collecting sellable trash, there is even less incentive to implement recycling programs in the cities to divert some of the landfill trash, which has long since surpassed its capacity and is dangerous to residents and the environment. 

My left hand-holder holding out a seed for me to look at.

A girl from our English class who escorted us foreigners on the tour looking out at the orange trucks that sometimes wait in line for up to 8 hours to dump their trash.

My left hand-holder told me (in bahasa Indonesia) that an elderly lady was killed last week in a trash avalanche on this slope while she was picking through the trash. You can barely see the red, white and green shirts of the trash sorters in the middle and at the top. They carry a basket on their back and wear thick wellies while hiking this mountain.

Our escorts stopped to crowd around a run-over kitten.

Trucks leaving. The bubbles in the groundwater, black like oil, is methane.

The row of houses to the left is where several of our escorts told me they live.

Man selling snacks.

Two friendly parents sorting through trash who were surprised when I asked in Indonesian to take their picture.

Teenagers painting drums.



After finishing his porridge, this boy flung his Styrofoam bowl and plastic spoon into the ditch of trash.

Driving out, we got a two-second look at trucks entering the recycling center, where recycling is then sold.

~~~

We tend to perceive nature as this fragile thing that we selfish humans are corrupting, but I think it’s more realistic, not to mention more helpful from a Darwinian standpoint, to think of ourselves as the fragile organisms. Other species, like the golden bug pictured above, are resilient and can thrive even in a wasteland like the one I visited on Sunday. Human life, on the other hand, is much more easily snuffed out. If nothing else affects our behaviors, then, at the very least, a sense of self-preservation should. At our IGLOW gender equity and youth development camp next month I am most looking forward to our sessions on the environment so that we can hear from local activists about what we can personally do. We all have to start somewhere. The most important thing is that we start.