Citarum clean-up ‘must start’ with locating polluters

Save the river: Greenpeace activists spread a giant banner on the Citarum River in West Java during a campaign to raise awareness about water pollution in the river. Antara/Yudhi Mahatma

Experts say they want to identify who is polluting Citarum River – and stop more environmental damage from hurting the people of three provinces who depend on it.

Ahmad Ashov Birry, a toxic water campaigner for Greenpeace Southeast Asia, said that mistakes in environmental policy have resulted health problems, economic losses and environmental losses.

“Despite [the river’s] many functions, the pollution in Citarum River is very visible. We need to do further studies to determine which companies are responsible for the chemical substances found there,” Ashov said.

Crossing the borders of the provinces of Banten, Jakarta and West Java, Citarum River’s basin covers 12,000 square kilometers and spans 13 administrative regions.

The Central Statistics Agency said that the number of people living along the river’s banks was 15,303,758 in 2009, half of whom lived in urban areas.

According to the results of an April survey conducted by Greenpeace and the LP3ES research institution involving 400 residents from 20 villages living near the river, 79.8 percent of respondents said the river was polluted by industrial waste, 92.3 percent knew that toxic waste was dangerous for the environment, 82.5 percent agreed that industry should be responsible for pollution and 81 percent agreed that industry should stop polluting the river.

Meanwhile, 80.3 percent agreed that the government should institute stronger regulations to prevent industries from polluting the river and 68.3 percent agreed that the public should have easy to access information regarding toxic waste produced by industries.

Sunardi, an environmental toxicology expert from Padjajaran University in Bandung, said that the university had carried out many research projects on Citarum River that determined that the river contained toxic substances, including DDT, which has been banned in Indonesia since the 1980s.

“We have met with the local administration to deliver the results, but it seems that the commitment from related agencies is weak,” he said.

Citarum River is the main water supply for the capital with a catchment area covering 6,614 square kilometers, equivalent to 22 percent of West Java.

The river is also a primary source of electricity for Java and Bali since there are three hydroelectric dams located on the upper section of the river basin, specifically PLTA Saguling, PLTA Cirata and PLTA Ir. H. Djuanda, better known as PLTA Jatiluhur, which produce a combined 1,400 megawatts of power.

In a report titled Hidden Consequences: The cost of industrial water pollution on people, planet and profit, Greenpeace featured the cases of rivers in Global North countries such as Switzerland, the US, the Netherlands and Slovakia.

Ashov said that Indonesia could learn from their examples that a failure to preserve the environment or to contain damage promptly could cost the government a lot of money.

In the case of the so-called Swiss Toxic Dumps that took place between 1945 and 1996, companies from the Basel chemical industry disposed of around 400,000 tons of chemical waste in at least 25 locations around the Basel region that spans Switzerland, Germany and France and in other parts of Switzerland.

As a result, as of 2010, the Swiss chemical and pharmaceutical industries have spent more than 800 million Swiss francs (US$864.3 million) to deal with its past environmental damages.

It is estimated that the industry would need to spend an additional 1.5 billion to 2 billion Swiss francs in coming years to clean up the chemical waste dumps.

“If the companies spent more money in the past on research to manage waste they would not have to spend a lot of money now to make up for ‘cheap’ toxic disposal. We hope the government and companies in Indonesia can learn from the environmental mistakes made in the Global North,” Ashov said.

In Indonesia, Greenpeace has focused its zero discharge campaign on Citarum River as one of Java’s largest waterways.

Deni Riswandani from PKK DAS Citarum (Citarum Community Activists) said that government funding for the river clean-up was not transparent, adding that it reflected a lack of support for communities to preserve the environment.

“While there have been environmental initiatives made by the communities, including biogas processing and non-organic waste management, the government has yet to show support on the product’s marketing development,” he said.