A private company, PT Jimbaran Lestari, proves that waste management and processing can be a profitable business in Bali.
The company, which pioneered large-scale commercial waste management and processing on the island, was established in 1994.
In its early stages, it received generous assistance from the Wisnu Foundation, a leading local environmental NGO.
"At that time, we campaigned hard to promote responsible and sustainable waste management. The campaign specifically targeted the island's growing tourism industry," Wisnu's Chairman Made Suarnatha recalled.
Tourism produced a huge amount of waste, but most of it had not been managed in a responsible manner.
Wisnu's activists found and documented several hotels and restaurants that dumped their garbage at public sites without processing them first.
"Our campaign ran along the line, 'Treat waste as an asset not a liability', but we needed private enterprise to make that a reality since Wisnu is a non-profit organization. During that campaign, PT Jimbaran Lestari expressed its readiness to be our partner," he added.
In the initial stages of the partnership, PT Jimbaran Lestari constructed the proper waste management and processing facilities while Wisnu lobbied numerous hotels in the Nusa Dua and Jimbaran areas to participate in a mutually beneficial relationship with the company.
Today, PT Jimbaran Lestari offers a comprehensive waste management and processing service to a growing number of clients. Its services include composting, recycling and waste separation and selection.
Co-owned by Nyoman Sutarman and his wife Made Seni, it now operates a main processing plant on a two-hectare plot right in the middle of a housing area in Jimbaran.
Unlike ordinary garbage sites, which are characterized by their pungent odors and large fly population, this plant is clean and relatively free from obnoxious smells. It is no wonder that its surrounding neighbors have never registered a complaint regarding the plant's presence.
"We have a strict policy on transporting garbage in and out of the plant. This has succeeded in keeping bad odors at a minimum level," the company's program manager Stephen D Wattimena said recently.
First of all, the garbage must be inside sealed plastic containers during transport. Also, when transporting garbage, the trucks are always fully covered with thick sheets of tarpaulins. The tarpaulins prevent the containers from accidentally falling out of the trucks.
"Therefore, it only smells bad in the loading and unloading stages and we have tried to minimize this time by training our employees to complete these stages as quickly as possible," he said.
Inside, the front of the plant looks like any ordinary office, with its glass door, smiling receptionists in the lobby and air-conditioned working spaces and meeting rooms.
The real work is conducted in the spacious area behind the plant's administrative offices.
The unloading area is separated into several stalls, which bare the names of popular tourist establishments in Bali, such as the Conrad, Bulgari and Hard Rock hotels.
Once the garbage is unloaded, the workers immediately set about the laborious work of separating the organic waste from the inorganic. If they find an intact eating utensil, such as a fork or a spoon, then it will be placed in a special container.
"We will return those objects to the respective hotels or restaurants. Its part of our contract with the clients. We will send back to them any object that, in our opinion, is not garbage," Wattimena stressed.
Inorganic wastes are then packaged and sent to various factories in East Java for further recycling while the organic wastes are transported to the composting facility at the far corner of the plant.
"Once the composting process is over, we will send the compost to the hotels where the organic waste originally came from," he added.
This scheme gives the hotels and restaurants the opportunity to fertilize their gardens using compost from their own organic garbage.
"In this context, we help the hotels and restaurants process their organic waste for further use. Ten kilograms of waste will produce seven kilograms of high quality compost," he said.
The company's composts are in high demand, but it has limited production capacity. Currently it is only able to meet its clients' demands.
PT Jimbaran Lestari serves up to 30 hotels and restaurants in Jimbaran, Nusa Dua, Kuta, Sanur and Denpasar. It also caters to dozens of pig farmers.
"Each day our plant produces up to 2,500 liters of organic liquids. The farmers feed these liquids to their livestock which we sell to them at the very reasonable price of Rp 5,500 (58 US cents) per 25 liters," he said.
The waste management company has grown into a large-scale business that operates a fleet of eight trucks and is staffed with 40 workers. It has also started another initiative: Community-based waste management in Jimbaran village.
"For us, garbage is not garbage -- garbage is money," he underlined.
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