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rowing awareness has driven down the amount of daily waste in South Tangerang, Banten, by roughly 15 percent to around 250 tons in the past three years, a city administration official said.

South Tangerang Sanitation Agency head Taher Rochmadi said the agency realized the most effective way to reduce waste was to minimize the production of household waste, which made up 70 percent of the city’s total waste.

“We have been campaigning about waste management to South Tangerang citizens since 2013. Our main targets were children because such knowledge should be taught at an early age,” Taher told The Jakarta Post.

He explained that citizens were taught how to sort waste into organics and non-organics. After that, they were asked to submit the non-organics to garbage banks in the city, while the organics were to be processed by the residents into fertilizers.

If all South Tangerang citizens conducted these processes correctly, the amount of waste across the city would significantly decrease, Taher said.

South Tangerang, a 147-square-kilometer city with 1.4 million people, was earlier reported for failing to implement a satisfactory waste management system because it lacked an adequate number of temporary trash disposal sites (TPS). Its final trash disposal site (TPA) processes only 30 percent of its total daily waste, a ministry report said last year.

Furthermore, many of the existing TPS were not functioning properly, forcing a large number of residents to burn their trash and suffer the negative effects of air pollution, officials from the Environment and Forestry Ministry said in a statement after a recent visit to the city.

To disseminate knowledge of waste management to children, the city administration said it had introduced a superhero mascot called Pelitas.

A staff member of the South Tangerang Sanitation Agency, Odji Restanto, told the Post separately that Pelitas, along with a number of agency officers, consistently visited children at several schools across the city in hopes that the education of waste management by a superhero would better engage children.

“We have also created a comic book about the superhero for children in the city,” Odji said. The first edition of the comic book about Pelitas is titled The Threat of Limki Monster. Limki is an abbreviation of limbah kimia (chemical waste).

Odji added that the agency learned from the administration of Timra in Sweden about the method of educating children by using a superhero. “Such a teaching method works well in Timra, so we imitated it,” he said.

The city had been cooperating with Timra since last year, Taher said, adding that some officials from his agency visited Timra in 2014 and 2015 and learned that the city focused heavily on educating children about waste management.

On Wednesday, officials from Timra visited architecture firm LabTanya in Bintaro to learn about its waste management program City Without Trash.

In the program that started in January last year, a number of households on Jl. Camar and Jl. Pinguin, better known as Caping, in Bintaro were asked to buy groceries with reusable bags and sort waste into organics and non-organics.

A founder of LabTanya, Ignasius Susiadi Wibowo, said the organic waste was turned into compost while non-organic waste was handed to garbage collectors.

“By doing so, each household can reduce the amount of waste by up to 98 percent,” Ignasius told the Post, adding that about 80 households in Caping had already joined the program.

“We are constantly promoting this program in Caping. Those who already joined the program are also voluntarily involved in the promotion of it,” he said. (vny)