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ne recent night on the north boulevard in Kelapa Gading, North Jakarta, the brushing sound of a sturdy broom sweeping the asphalt continued into the wee hours. All the local stores had long since closed, leaving piles of garbage scattered along the shoulder.

Wearing a dust mask and orange uniform, Silpia, 42, held the long-handled sapu lidih (broom made from coconut fronds), as he swept up the litter scattered here and there along the 2-kilometer stretch.

For most of us, this ritual goes unnoticed, every day.

“None of the store owners separate this garbage, perhaps because they think [collecting and separating trash] is what I get paid to do,” Silpia told The Jakarta Post recently.

When it comes to garbage management, many Jakartans apparently have no idea.

The journey of waste, from the home to a landfill, along with its management, is a costly and often a bleak reality.

Trash collected from households is first separated by trash pickers, with most of the biodegradable matter going directly to Indonesia’s largest landfill site, Bantar Gebang, in Bekasi.

Non-organic waste, including plastics and metals, is bread and butter for trash-pickers who do the daily rounds on the streets of Jakarta, collecting recyclable material to sell to lapaks, businesses that buy waste materials from trash collectors.

Lapak owner Ngadenin, 42, of Ciketing Udik, a village next to Bantar Gebang, said he bought a range of reusable and recyclable materials, from old toys to cardboard boxes and to plastic bottles, for between Rp 700 (80 US cents) and 1,800 per kilogram, from the garbage pickers once every ten days.

“I manage 15 trash pickers who are skilled at sorting out recyclables .. The final products are sold to recycling factories across Java,” he said.

The 110-hectare Bantar Gebang landfill is home to around 300 lapaks and more than 8,000 trash pickers who are mostly migrants — some from as far away as Ternate, but most are from Java.

Jakarta produces around 6,000 tons of solid waste a day, 4,500 tons of which is dumped at Bantar Gebang. The city administration pays Rp 107,000 for each ton of garbage it dumps at the landfill every day.

This means Jakarta is paying about Rp 14.45 billion to the Bekasi municipality and the Bantar Gebang management every month, with the revenue split 20-80.

Around 55 percent of the trash that comes to Bantar Gebang, 2,275 tons, is organic waste, 250 tons of which goes into a composting plant.

The remaining organic waste is left to decompose, while emitting dangerous methane gas that precipitates into the atmosphere.

“If this is allowed to happen on an ongoing basis, the escaped methane gas poses a threat not only to the health of the community here but also to climate change in general,” national garbage management coalition head Bagong Suyoto told
the Post.

A recent project using waste management technology under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) has proposed to capture this gas before it escapes into the atmosphere, so that its energy could be harnessed and used as an energy resource, he said.

Bagong, who also oversees waste management at Bantar Gebang, said ideally the landfill should make use of its organic wastes more effectively for composting rather than for the CDM project, because the former’s process was simpler.

“Bantar Gebang should increase the volume it sends to the composting plant from 250 tons to 1,000 or 1,500 tons,” he said, adding that the landfill planned to expand by 20 hectares to accommodate more garbage from Jakarta.

Boun, board member of the coalition, said the issue of garbage in Jakarta lay in the city administration’s apparent inability to empower and encourage community-based waste management.

“The 2008 Waste Management Law requires the city to encourage the grass roots to manage waste independently, but in reality, they have failed, as shown by the steady and sometimes increasing volume of waste coming to Bantar Gebang,”
he said.

Environmental Task Force director Ahmad Safrudin said Bantar Gebang was designed to serve as a sanitary landfill, which meant that the facility managed only organic waste.

“But in reality, more than 40 percent of the waste is non-organic, and the trash keeps coming,” Ahmad said.

Between 2005 and 2006, the city allocated Rp 400 billion to waste management, and increased this to around Rp 700 billion in 2009. (tsy)