An enigma wrapped in plastic

Call it instant garbage: How much wrapping does any one thing need?

Three dolphin-shaped garbage cans in a park in Pluit, North Jakarta, Indonesia are supposed to help people separate their organic, paper and plastic waste, but they have seen little success.

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Inside the paper bag was a plastic bag. Inside the plastic bag the purchase was enveloped in thick paper sealed with sticky tape. Within this paper was another layer – this time of plastic film adorned with a small paper label. There at the heart of four layers of wrapping was a single item: one loaf of whole wheat bread.

Indonesia has taken steps to curb the huge amount of trash the nation generates, but it is a truly monumental task. The country has, with much justification, been identified as one of the prime contributors to the plastic waste that has for many years been forming massive floating islands of garbage in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and, more recently, been killing whales that have been eating many kilograms of indigestible plastic, causing them to starve to death with full stomachs.

Indonesians themselves are not oblivious to the problem, even as they add to it. They can themselves see the garbage floating in their rivers and oceans and washing up on their once-pristine shorelines. However, even as the residents of Jakarta blame garbage for the city’s frequent flooding by clogging drains and damming waterways, many of them continue to thoughtlessly litter the streets and throw trash into the rivers. Certain cases have raised public awareness and incited criticism of the behavior – like when a man was filmed flagrantly tossing a bag of garbage into a river within sight of a city clean-up worker and when a photograph of piles of trash at the entrance of one of the stations of Jakarta’s brand new MRT commuter service went viral – but others continue to happen and they are mostly ignored.

However, for Jakartans the disposal of garbage is not such an easy thing because there’s just so much of it. Every day the city’s population of 13.2 million people produces at least 7,000 tons of garbage, of which as much as 2,400 tons is plastic, and – despite the triplets of garbage receptacles intended for organic, paper and plastic waste – little of it is sorted for recycling.

Of course, some is. A common sight in the city is scavengers who scour the streets with handcarts or the rivers with boats and small rafts, searching for plastic bottles and other semi-valuable cast-offs. These they cash in at various depots where the bottles are removed from the waste stream, although the workers simply return the caps and labels – which, once stripped from the bottles, have no monetary value – back on the way to the dump or sometimes even straight back into the river, if the depot is located by the water.

Some local government organizations started taking upon themselves the responsibility for recycling almost all types of garbage and not just plastic bottles and the movement has exploded in the city. Hundreds of so-called waste banks have been set up that invite nearby residents to “deposit” their household trash in return for cash and the city’s central administration wants at least 1,000 established throughout Jakarta. Even educational institutions have begun to participate and by October 2018 240 schools in North Jakarta – that is reportedly every school in the urban region – have set up their own waste banks. The efforts appear to be succeeding on the local level.

However, there is still a lot of garbage that is collected by city workers and at present it has only one destination: out of town. It all goes to the Bantar Gebang Integrated Waste Treatment Area in Bekasi, east of Jakarta, but so much has gone there that the dumpsite will be full by the time Jakarta’s 20-year contract to use it expires in 2029. Plans are being made to find new destinations for Jakarta’s garbage, but the implementation of any of them is still years away. The measure most likely to be up and running first is not a new one, but an old one: burn it. The city, along with private investors, plans to build a large incinerator and use the heat from the burning garbage to generate electricity. Critics say the facility would obviously add to the already horrendous air pollution, but proponents insist the incinerator technology would burn the garbage hot enough to eliminate most toxins.

Of course, the first step in reducing the amount of garbage being thrown away is to reduce the amount that is produced in the first place. Indonesia has made some moves in this direction, but with limited progress. Two attempts in recent years by the central government to require retailers to charge Rp 200 (about 1 US cent) for plastic bags, but both times it just as quickly abandoned the policy in the face of resistance from the industries involved, despite a general and growing public acceptance.

More recently, the Jakarta administration announced it would ban the distribution of plastic bags, imposing fines of between Rp 5 million and Rp 25 million, but not the use of other single-use plastic containers, of which there are many in circulation: take-out food boxes of all kinds and sizes. The city government has delayed implementation of the policy several times, so the actual start date remains uncertain. In the meantime, on their own initiative to help reduce plastic waste by 70 per cent by 2025, many members of the Indonesian Retail Association started once again to charge for plastic bags – not just in Jakarta but elsewhere in Indonesia, including on Bali, which began enforcing restrictions on their use at the beginning of this year.

Essentially, in the end the only way any attempt to reduce garbage in Jakarta and the rest of Indonesia will succeed is if the people themselves decide to stop generating the trash that gets littered. Perhaps the first step is simply to recognize that something like a loaf of bread does not need four layers of wrapping.