Dross
When I think about what I would do, were I a mega-wealthy, gifted statesman in Indonesia, I often think about garbage.
With 12 million residents in Jakarta, there’s a lot of it here & no regular or well-regulated system of disposal. I think to garbage not just because it’s right in front of me, but also because unlike the even more complicated & exciting issues at hand today (like mud volcanoes, corruption, the national airlines & trains crashing, the challenges of a recently decentralized government in an enormous, highly diverse country laid out on a series of islands, or division of mosque & state), fixing the GARBAGE problem seems possible & only good. This might one of those universal issues that everyone could support.
No? This isn't Singapore with its fleet of elderly scrubbing the curbsides with toothbrushes. So far Indonesian garbage seems redolent of everything BUT a business opportunity. So long as disease is not rampant, it isn't a paying priority. What's in place works well enough.
You’d at least have to, what, assemble some public & private bins, people to collect it, equipped trucks & drivers, train everyone & create a culture of making use of all this (maybe some laws against littering once the system is in place). And, of course, you'd need a huge place to put it all. If only it were that simple. Because there are high costs & many hazardous things that people dump, diseases would probably play a role, & then there’s the mysterious science of dumping.
The Science of Dumping
I read in the papers about someone who did take this as an opportunity of sorts. His family decided to let people use their back yard as a dump. This worked out just fine for years—people paid him to dump their things, his family made some money, the neighborhood was that much cleaner—until one day a towering wall of garbage came down like an avalanche & killed people.
Now, much of Jakarta does have regular garbage service of course—this is a functioning, international metropolis, after all, the business districts are no dirtier than some US cities, & the malls can as lavish & familiar as they come—just not everywhere & never enough. I’ve seen people peeing, bathing & throwing their garbage into the brown river right here in the city, in broad daylight. I’ve seen a guy exit his house to the street’s edge, swing a white plastic bag around & around, & then whoop! lob it right over the edge, where it opened in mid-air & scattered all his rubbish & slop into the water below.
On the eastern island of Sulawesi, Fulbrighter istri (wife) EJM & her husband actually paid someone to motorcycle their household garbage into town, to a trash bin. There was no where else to put it. They were trying to do the right thing. Then one day they caught sight of a certain cereal box in the river & knew at once that it was theirs. They were standing on a little bridge looking down to places where no one should climb. They couldn’t retrieve it. To do so would be almost meaningless anyway: there was garbage everywhere.
Even so, there they were on this bridge in Tana Toraja suddenly recognizing their own personal waste amongst it all, their own distinctive splat of squalor on this foreign riverbank, their drinking water lapping at it.
Consider what it would take—& what it would require you to do differently—for that to be possible for you where you are now, that is: for someone to motorcycle your household garbage into the next town (or the nearest river) for disposal. You’d probably have to produce a lot less garbage for one thing.
"Cleanliness is Part of Faith
Let's Increase Cleanliness in the Work Environment"
sign at the Sunda Kelapa pier
With 12 million residents in Jakarta, there’s a lot of it here & no regular or well-regulated system of disposal. I think to garbage not just because it’s right in front of me, but also because unlike the even more complicated & exciting issues at hand today (like mud volcanoes, corruption, the national airlines & trains crashing, the challenges of a recently decentralized government in an enormous, highly diverse country laid out on a series of islands, or division of mosque & state), fixing the GARBAGE problem seems possible & only good. This might one of those universal issues that everyone could support.
No? This isn't Singapore with its fleet of elderly scrubbing the curbsides with toothbrushes. So far Indonesian garbage seems redolent of everything BUT a business opportunity. So long as disease is not rampant, it isn't a paying priority. What's in place works well enough.
You’d at least have to, what, assemble some public & private bins, people to collect it, equipped trucks & drivers, train everyone & create a culture of making use of all this (maybe some laws against littering once the system is in place). And, of course, you'd need a huge place to put it all. If only it were that simple. Because there are high costs & many hazardous things that people dump, diseases would probably play a role, & then there’s the mysterious science of dumping.
The Science of Dumping
I read in the papers about someone who did take this as an opportunity of sorts. His family decided to let people use their back yard as a dump. This worked out just fine for years—people paid him to dump their things, his family made some money, the neighborhood was that much cleaner—until one day a towering wall of garbage came down like an avalanche & killed people.
Now, much of Jakarta does have regular garbage service of course—this is a functioning, international metropolis, after all, the business districts are no dirtier than some US cities, & the malls can as lavish & familiar as they come—just not everywhere & never enough. I’ve seen people peeing, bathing & throwing their garbage into the brown river right here in the city, in broad daylight. I’ve seen a guy exit his house to the street’s edge, swing a white plastic bag around & around, & then whoop! lob it right over the edge, where it opened in mid-air & scattered all his rubbish & slop into the water below.
On the eastern island of Sulawesi, Fulbrighter istri (wife) EJM & her husband actually paid someone to motorcycle their household garbage into town, to a trash bin. There was no where else to put it. They were trying to do the right thing. Then one day they caught sight of a certain cereal box in the river & knew at once that it was theirs. They were standing on a little bridge looking down to places where no one should climb. They couldn’t retrieve it. To do so would be almost meaningless anyway: there was garbage everywhere.
Even so, there they were on this bridge in Tana Toraja suddenly recognizing their own personal waste amongst it all, their own distinctive splat of squalor on this foreign riverbank, their drinking water lapping at it.
Consider what it would take—& what it would require you to do differently—for that to be possible for you where you are now, that is: for someone to motorcycle your household garbage into the next town (or the nearest river) for disposal. You’d probably have to produce a lot less garbage for one thing.
"Cleanliness is Part of Faith
Let's Increase Cleanliness in the Work Environment"
sign at the Sunda Kelapa pier
posted by Anne E. Campisi at 3:14 PM
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