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Blitar man resolves plastic waste problem in one district, but what about the country?
At his recycling site, Muryani claims to be able to recycle half of some 400 kilograms of waste produced in a day in Wlingi district, Blitar, East Java.
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Muryani, a resident of Wlingi district in Blitar, East Java, designs a small-scale device to recycle used plastic. (JP/Aman Rochman)
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mid rising concern about a surge of trash imports into the country, a resident of Blitar city, East Java, has built a small-scale pyrolysis device to recycle plastic waste.
Muryani, 60, a resident of Wlingi district who only attended formal education up to elementary school, has made a living for the past decade by collecting waste in the area and processing it into fuel, along with six other garbage pickers.
“I recycle plastic waste into fuel using the device I designed in 2009,” Muryani said at the Wlingi waste landfill and processing site (TPST Wlingi).
Thanks to the device, he said, he could reduce the volume of plastic waste in the district. Out of some 400 kilograms of waste produced in a day, he claimed that about half was recycled on the site.
“The difficulty in recycling is separating the waste,” he said.
Indonesia, along with other Southeast Asian countries, has experienced a garbage crisis after China, once the world’s largest recycler, stopped accepting waste imports from developed countries at the beginning of 2018.
Containers filled with unsorted waste, declared as plastic scraps and used papers, started to arrive at the country’s ports. With a lack of good waste management, some of the waste has piled up in Bangun village in Mojokerto, another city in East Java.
