Tourism and garbage in Bali

Paper, Plastic, Other? Let's scavengers decide
Jakarta Post 14 Dec 07;

Welcoming more than 10,000 participants of the United Nations climate change conference, Nusa Dua demonstrated its green practice when it comes to garbage.

At the conference venue at the Bali International Convention Center, organizers have placed a set of three trash bins at several points, one for plastic garbage, one for paper and one for others. The arrangement may show delegates the area is part of an integrated recycle system.

The truth is there is no garbage handling system in place in Nusa Dua or Badung regency in general. All garbage, regardless of its type, is dumped at Suwung, some 20 kilometers north of Nusa Dua. Much is even disposed of at illegal dump sites on vacant lands or in mangrove forests.

In labor-intensive Indonesia, sorting is conducted by scavengers; many roam across cities hunting out recyclable garbage while some live near dumps. The scavengers take only those promising an income and leave the useless.

One such illegal dump was located by the main road leading to the BICC, causing a small itch in the eye.

Monday afternoon on Dec. 10, when President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and high-level officials from abroad arrived in Bali, the Badung authorities tried to doctor the itch. They closed the illegal dump, covering it with a solid fence, after cleaning a mountain of garbage from the site.

"Some officials came yesterday afternoon. They looked tense. They sent a machine to remove a heap of garbage there on the mangrove forest next to the land. Afterwards, they fenced the plot," an employee of a restaurant next to the formerly illegal dump told The Jakarta Post Tuesday.

"It used to be a dump site. People came on motorbikes at night and dropped their garbage there," a scavenger living near the site said with a Javanese accent.

About a dozen other scavengers, plus a goat, live there.

There are two further dump sites, about one kilometer apart, near a school deep inside a village. Motorists traveling on the by-pass road may not spot these dumps. One of them used to be a mangrove forest. The waste here appears to be from households, as it packed in small plastic bags.

The other dump site, which is bigger in size, looks like the place to dispose of waste, apparently from a hospitality business. There are bunches of large black plastic bags as well as boxes of empty milk cartons. A dead mouse adds to the messy scenery.

Problems with garbage here are partly related to the Balinese penchant for pigs and tourism.

I Ketut Teji, a pig farmer, recounted that about two decades ago he was paid by hotels to haul their garbage. He took the kitchen waste to feed his pigs and dumped the rest at Suwung on his way home not far from the dump site. "Other haulers sometimes just dumped the rest of the garbage on vacant plots or mangrove forests. Suwung was too far for them," he said.

After some time, Teji said, the hotels started to see the value of the garbage, while the demand for kitchen waste as pig feed was also on the rise.

Hotels stopped paying him and instead Teji, like other pig farmers, had to pay the hotels. "Now, I pay a hotel for Rp 1 million a year. I get the pig feed but I have to dump the rest at my own expense."

"Hotels should pay for a professional hauler to manage their waste. Otherwise, Bali's garbage problem will continue to deteriorate and tourists will leave," Olivier Pouillon, the manager of garbage hauler PT Jimbaran Lestari, said.

The company was founded by a local Jimbaran resident who once worked like Teji. He hauled garbage from hotels, took the pig feed, and dumped the rest near one hotel. He later met Pouillon and his friends who then worked for an environmental foundation. They set up "a formal integrated waste management system", offering their services to hotels.

Amidst tight competition over garbage, asking hotels to pay for their garbage is not easy, Pouillon said.

"We now work with about 25 hotels around Nusa Dua, Jimbaran and Benoa. They are good hotels that care about the environment."

At Jimbaran Lestari, 30 workers sort garbage from about 25 trucks every day. They separate plastic, paper, hard paper, organic waste from kitchen, organic waste from garden, and TetraPak packages. Leaves from garden are being composted and given back to hotels for garden maintenance.

The residue, Pouillon said, amounts to about five trucks. "From 25 trucks of garbage, we only dump five of them at Suwung. The other 20 are recycled."

He claims the company’s recycling practice manages to reduce about 800 tons of methane, which equals about 1,700 tons of CO2 emission per month. "It could be more if only more hotels were willing to pay for their waste management," he said. (Evi Mariani/***)