S

ince the west wind started to blow in October last year, the paradise island’s famous Kuta Beach has seen as much as 3,600 tons of trash washed ashore, which is equivalent to a total of 1,200 fully-loaded trucks.

Kuta traditional village head I Gusti Ketut Sudira recalled that 45 years ago, the season’s wind brought wood which was used by villagers for cooking fuel.

However, today’s trash comes in many different forms; all kinds of plastic, rubber, clothing, dead animals, even couches and beds, all of which allegedly originates from the Island of Java, the country’s most populated and polluted island, from where the west wind blows.

“During this season, especially after it rains, the entire beach will be covered in trash. An hour after we clean it, more will arrive. Thus, we can load dozens of trucks in a single day,” head of the Kuta beach management unit that oversees security, sanitation, and wildlife and turtle conservation, I Gusti Ngurah Tresna, known as Gung Aji, told The Jakarta Post on Sunday.

Because of the Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency (BMKG)’s prediction that this year’s west wind season will last to May, longer than in previous years, Kuta village and Badung regency say their sanitation forces will stay on-guard in the daily battle against the flood of trash.

“We do not mean to tempt fate, but the peak of the flood of trash was in December and January, and we’ve proven that we were capable to handling that,” head of the sanitary agency of Badung regency Putu Eka Mertawan told the Post.

“Our sanitation forces are ready 24 hours a day with five heavy trucks,” said Eka, adding that the agency had also increased the monthly salary of their 12-man quick-response unit from Rp 1.1 million (US$120) to Rp 1.35 million.

As the trash flood is regarded as an inter-provincial problem, Eka urged the Tourism and Creative Economy Minister Mari Elka Pangestu to quickly act on last year’s promise to arrange better coordination between provincial administrations to solve the trash problem both off-shore and on the beaches. “We hope the ministry will realize that promise this year. Next year will be too late.”

Apart from the personnel of the so-called quick response unit, which was formed immediately following last year’s publication of Time magazine’s “Holidays in Hell: Bali’s Ongoing Woes” article, the villages along the 9-kilometer beaches of Kuta, Jimbaran, Kedonganan, Seminyak and Legian also deploy 74 sanitation workers.

The workers are financially supported by the Bali Beach Clean Up program sponsored by the Coca Cola Amatil Indonesia and Quicksilver companies. In addition to them, as many as 200 trash bins plus four tractor trucks are now available around the beaches.

Despite all the efforts to tackle the massive flood of trash, Sudira acknowledged that more needed to be done in terms of raising the awareness of locals and visitors of making the effort to use the bins for their trash.

“Every evening, our personnel have to walk along the beach with megaphones to remind locals and visitors not to throw away trash as they wish. But still we’ve seen that they prefer to bury the trash in the sand as they leave the benches, often only some 10 meters away from the nearest bin.”

Sudira said that despite the existence of sanitation regulations that made the act of littering a violation, the enforcement of the regulations remained difficult.

“It is still very difficult to raise such awareness among our people. We need more time,” said Sudira.

The Bali Beach Clean Up joint cooperation between private companies and the village communities has been organized since 2010.