12 Mar
Cause and Ineffectual
Every rainy season, the Jakarta City Hall blames squatters who throw household refuse into the rivers for the floods, and in a minor way they are partly at fault. But then City Hall is responsible for disposing the 6,000+ tons of garbage 'produced' in a day and can't.
The rare 'Keep Jakarta Tidy' campaigns are not followed through, environmental guidelines, if issued, are not enforced and recycling is left to the informal sector – many of whom are landless squatters.
So I suppose we should give half-hearted praise to Gov. Fuzzy Bodoh for announcing that his administration is 'mulling' an initiative to build an incinerator for organic waste.
Last December I quoted the head of the Jakarta Sanitation Agency Eko Bharuna as saying that not all Jakarta's rubbish gets collected and dumped in the Bantar Gebang landfill, the city’s rivers were getting narrower and shallower due to frequent littering. Many city residents throw their garbage in the river because of poor trash management.
He admitted that such problems might have occurred as his agency had a shortage of garbage trucks because “we only have 841 garbage trucks and 40 percent of them have been operating for more than 14 years."
Yesterday, commenting on this recycled initiative, he pointed out that in order to implement the new technology, which Singapore manages successfully as it disposes of 1,000 tons of organic waste a day, Jakarta would need to regulate the separation of organic and non-organic waste which would then force the administration to use two different garbage trucks.
Furthermore, Jakarta would choose a less technologically advanced incinerator than Singapore's due to constraints on the budget.
"The Jakarta administration is focussed on handling floods. Waste management is not a priority," he said.
Susan Abeysekere in her wonderful book "Jakarta: A History" writes:
In 1951, there were only 47 rubbish trucks and 600 hand carts available to remove rubbish, and at any one time about one-sixth of these were out of action because of poor condition. Three years later, the situation had deteriorated further: some vehicles had given up entirely, and the break down for the rest had increased. For the whole of Jakarta [!] there were only 60 men and 4 trucks employed to empty privies, and again the trucks, which were more than thirty years old, were never all in use. Most kampung houses did not have their own privy, so it is particularly shocking to learn that this city of almost two million people possessed on 84 public privies in 1954, none of which had water laid on."
During this time piped water was only available at Kebayoran Baru.
This is Jakarta between 1951 – 1954. Note that the population was only two million! That was only 56 years ago.
Comparatively, it appears as if nothing has changed.
For some reason Jakarta is stuck – for some; for others live behind the walls of gated communities and malls.
I highly recommend Abeyasekere's book. For example she writes of the fires which raged through the city kampungs in the 1950s were off the scale leaving tens of thousand homeless.
speaking of incinerator, some years back I learned that some students at a university in surabaya managed to build an incinerator, with some steps of filtration to ensure it does not pollute.
Made by students. 100% made in Indonesia.
So when I read your post about Jakarta's " initiative to build an incinerator", I really hope the machine would not be… er.. imported.
wew… nice picture… It's a prove that Jakarta is a REALLY CLEAN city…