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After coal ash, Indonesia pulls more waste from hazard list
Waste from the iron, steel and palm oil industries mostly contain dioxins that are deemed highly toxic and can cause health problems, including cancer.
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Quality control: A steel factory worker in Cikarang industrial estate inspects product quality in Bekasi, West Java on Oct. 4, 2019. (Antara/Fakhri Hermansyah)
C
oal-burning byproducts are not the only materials excluded from the list of strictly regulated hazardous and dangerous (B3) waste, as the government delists more wastes from other industries that are potentially harmful to humans in order to be repurposed for other products, activists have found.
Environmental group Nexus3 Foundation found that a 2021 government regulation on environmental protection did not include byproducts of the steel, iron and palm oil industries on the list of B3 materials. The policy is one of the dozens of the Job Creation Law’s derivative regulations.
Among the delisted materials are steel and nickel slag, which are obtained from the iron and steel industry and commonly contain trace amounts of toxic metals such as chromium and manganese.
The palm oil industry produces spent bleaching earth (SBE) as a byproduct. The industry uses powdered bleaching earth to refine the palm oil’s clarity and remove any odors. The spent powder retains some residual oil that must be disposed of carefully to prevent it from leaching into the soil and water or catching fire.
“It’s important to know that those wastes contain dioxins. If left unchecked, dioxins could accumulate [in the environment],” Nexus3 founder Yuyun Ismawati said in a discussion in late March.
The World Health Organization defines dioxins as a group of chemically related compounds that are persistent environmental pollutants. They are commonly found accumulating in the food chain, mainly in the fatty tissue of animals.
