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oncerned that no significant change has been made since the infamous garbage landslide a decade ago, a group of locals in Bandung, West Java, have declared themselves the city'€™s '€œgarbage detectives'€.

They have tasked themselves with locating sites to process garbage into compost and places where people can sell or collect garbage and share what they receive through the BebasSampah.id website.

Anilawati Nurwakhidin of the Bioscience and Biotechnology Development Foundation (YPBB) said the website was set up to consolidate information about waste management in Bandung.

'€œThis is a form of the people'€™s contribution to managing garbage,'€ Anilawati said. The platform also provides information about living a zero-waste lifestyle, simple garbage management and tips on how to make use of garbage.

The website is a joint effort by the YPBB, the Association of Bandung Institute of Technology'€™s Environment Engineering Alumni and Greeneration Foundation. It is funded by the Ford Foundation.

'€œWe want to bring the model to other regions in Indonesia by 2016,'€ said Junerosano of the Greeneration Foundation.

Initiators of the activity expressed the hope that the easy-to-access platform would encourage people to manage garbage better, starting from families and neighborhoods all the way up to subdistrict and district levels.

Anilawati once said if garbage could be managed at the source, it would increase the efficiency of transporting it to other locations. '€œApart from that, the need for vast tracts of land to dump garbage can also be reduced,'€ she said.

Through the website, people can also access information about marked and verified locations.

Deputy assistant of garbage management at the Environment and Forestry Ministry, Sudirman, appreciated the website, saying that managing garbage at the family level was the best way to reduce waste.

'€œPeople cannot leave the reduce, reuse and recycle principle behind,'€ he said.

A decade ago, an explosion at a landfill in Leuwigajah caused by accumulated methane gas triggered a landslide that killed 147 people in Bandung. It left piles of garbage strewn about city streets for 41 days.

'€œI have not yet lived Bandung at that time. Yet, as I have been living and studying here for six years, I learn that garbage management has not yet been considered as important,'€ Dwina Lubna, 23, who hailed from Medan, North Sumatra.

That was why, she said, she decided to join the platform and made herself a garbage detective together with 19 of her friends.

'€œHopefully, the people and the administration will be able to empower this movement,'€ said Dwina.