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View all search resultsBatam requests emergency status over garbage crisis
A sanction from the Environment ministry has forced Batam city administration to only use smaller section of its Telaga Pungkur final dumping site.
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Garbage mountain: A man sorts waste on Oct. 23 at the Segawe landfill in Tulungagung, East Java. The Environment ministry has encouraged regional administrations to make landfills more environmentally friendly. (Antara/Destyan Sujarwoko)
T
he Batam city administration has requested an emergency license with the Environment ministry to reactivate a closed section of the city’s final dumping site (TPA) because the existing section is too small and already overloaded.
Batam mayor Amsakar Achmad said garbage management in the city faced a “serious and complex crisis” because of a regulatory sanction imposed by the ministry.
Dumping practices at Telaga Pungkur TPA were not up to national standards because instead of using sanitary landfills, the site used an open dumping system.
For the infraction, the ministry imposed a sanction closing Zone A of the final dumping site, which together with Zone B consisted of a garbage pile of some 7.5 tonnes and 20 meters high.
Zone A’s closure forces all garbage trucks to dump garbage in the much smaller Zone B which has a limited road network, causing a long queue of garbage trucks every day.
“That is why I say technical mitigation did not work. In the past six years, there was relatively no big problem,” Amsakar said after attending a plenary meeting at the Batam City Council on Thursday.
“But why suddenly in the seventh year there was such an escalation?”
