A rubbish revolution is under way in Bali
Geoffrey Lean, The Telegraph 5 Mar 10;
It's known as the "Island of the Gods", but it's sinking under a rising sea of rubbish. You see garbage almost everywhere in Bali: on the beaches; dumped by roadsides; clogging rivers and streams and blocking drainage channels. This has got so bad that it is threatening not only people's health, but also that of the economy: two thirds of tourists surveyed said that it would prevent them from coming back. But, still, little is collected, and rubbish tips are overflowing.
And yet, on a disused pig farm not far from the main tourist beaches, a rubbish revolution is under way; it is spreading throughout Indonesia, and could have a bearing all over the Third World. I discovered it in between meetings of the world's environment ministers on the island last week, when tracing what happened to the contents of my hotel room wastepaper basket.
Beneath the corrugated iron roof of an open-ended old pig shed – amid swooping swallows – workers were painstakingly hand-separating paper, plastics, glass, aluminium, food scraps, vegetable matter and other material that can be used again, leaving only the remnants to go into the island's rudimentary waste disposal system. Every week, 140 lorryloads of waste arrive. Only 10 leave carrying real rubbish.
I was shown the operation by Yuyun Ismawati, who started it 12 years ago, then in her early thirties. An environmental engineer, designing water supply systems for wealthier areas, she decided to switch to working with the poor and picked garbage "because no one else wanted to touch it". She found the pig farmer was paying hotels for their waste – five-star food scraps for his animals – and persuaded him that recycling it would be more profitable. Now 25 hotels – including mine – pay him to take their garbage away. Almost all is recycled: food scraps are bought by pig farmers and grass clippings and other vegetation is composted, and mostly returned to the hotels for flowerbeds.
This, she says is the green economy – the very subject the ministers were discussing – in action, providing new employment for those that need it. In all, she adds, the operation supports over 400 "real green jobs", while the old farm employed just 10 people. It is very basic but it succeeds. "If you want a hi-tech solution in a developing country, you will wait and wait and wait until you get the money, or big donors to fund it. And even then it may not work."
A big blue machine, provided by the local government to process the waste stands idle in a corner, proving the point. The electricity needed to power it costs too much: human energy is cheaper, and employs more people. Ismawati wanted to get rid of the contraption but was persuaded to let it remain as a kind of monument to official support.
The scheme was the first of its kind in Indonesia. She has now established six more, all on the neighbouring island of Java. Now that the government has backed the idea, 15 are to be established annually.
Ismawati – who this year won a Goldman Award, the world's biggest prize for grassroots green activists – has had even more success with a similar plan for tackling an even bigger problem, the sanitation crisis. Only eight of Indonesia's 450 cities, she says, have a sewerage system, covering just 1.3 per cent of its almost 250 million population. Worldwide, over two billion people lack proper sanitation; the resulting pollution causes more than two million deaths a year.
Building big sewerage systems costs a fortune, and takes ages. But Ismawati found that she could rapidly get small schemes running for a fraction of the cost. Local government provides most of the funding, but the people it serves also chip in and are trained in their operation. Some 300 have been set up across Indonesia and, from this year, 1,000 – serving a total of a million people – are to be established annually.
Ismawati next wants to provide clean water in a similarly decentralised way and took me down a river to explain why. It was full of rubbish, of course, including the occasional dead cat. Batik dyers lined its banks: the colours, she said, often showed in the river. Water from rice paddies, presumably laden with pesticides, also ran into it.
Below all this, near the river mouth, was a water supply intake. Who gets this stuff, I asked? Ismawati thinks she knows, as she was once offered a job in the waterworks. She roared with laughter. "It probably goes to your hotel."
