The Jakarta Post - Weekender

A silver metallic Mercedes pulls up in front of my house; the driver, in safari suit and black polished shoes, gets out and opens the trunk. It is another delivery of goods – old newspapers, magazines, bottles and aluminum cans -- sent by a friend who lives in a nearby luxury apartment and who is passionate about recycling.

She is among several friends who leave their “trash” at my house to pass on to the city’s roaming trash-pickers.

I used to be perplexed by the people who would rip open the plastic bags of trash in the garbage receptacle in front of the house and scrape out the contents, leaving a trash trail down the street. Dogs would bark loudly when they passed, with sack over shoulder and a long metal hook for fishing out garbage. With filthy clothes and skin darkened by the sun, these bare-foot wanderers conjured up images of chimney sweeps from 19^th century London.

Treated with the same indifference as stray cats, these people may well be Indonesia’s version of India’s untouchable caste of public toilet cleaners and street sweepers. I often wondered what they were really looking for.

But in fact they are the unsung heroes of the recycling movement. No armchair environmentalists, they are responsible for chipping away at Jakarta’s mountains of garbage and reducing it by up to 30 percent.

While a growing number of neighborhoods in the capital now encourage residents to separate organic and nonorganic waste to producing compost and recycled paper etc., more often than not paper, cardboard and plastic is mixed with “wet” garbage, producing a stinky mess.

Scavengers risk their health sorting through the gooey mess, when a little thoughtfulness on our part could have saved them the trouble.

With the garbage-choked rivers in Jakarta responsible for the misery brought on us during the recent floods, poor waste management is partly to blame. It makes sense to dispense with plastic or at least reuse it. It takes little effort to carry a couple of extra plastic bags for trips to the supermarket.

I have an office colleague to thank for providing me with an avenue for recycling. Acquainted with a group of young trash-pickers who worked from a dump near her house, she suggested we collect usable trash at the office. Excited by the idea that one person’s trash could be another’s income, we scoured the office daily for mineral water bottles, cardboard boxes and aluminum cans. Saturday mornings was our date with the scavengers when we would distribute what we had collected during the week.

We quickly earned the title of “bag ladies” from our colleagues at work. Our huge desks had loads of space underneath where junk could be stashed, but the green movement in our office soon met with hurdles.

Once I arrived to discover my collection had disappeared. Apparently the office boy had been instructed to “clean it up”. I stormed over to the general affairs department to demand an explanation.

“Can you describe exactly what is missing from your desk … err from under your desk?” the staffer inquired.

“Yes, plastic bottles, aluminum cans, recycled paper… ,” I said, while observing a growing smirk on her face as mine reddened.

“Well, you should stop keeping ‘rubbish’ under your desk, shouldn’t you,” she retorted.

I left, admitting defeat, and came the next day with new plastic storage boxes and a new motto – fast in, fast out.

Others were more sympathetic: My supervisor passed on plastic bags, another friend collected empty plastic bottles after press conferences, a young mother collected the cartons from infant formula and the man who did the office photocopying would sort through discarded paper, taking what could be reused by him and giving me the rest. Office boys even separated aluminum cans and plastic bottles from the trash for me.

With plenty of trash to go around I decided to get acquainted with the scavengers in my neighborhood. Finding that the women were more appreciative of our efforts, we soon had a few regulars who came to the house every few days.

While there is the satisfaction of knowing that in some small way one is helping to reduce Jakarta’s garbage problem and helping people make ends meet, the scavengers face problems of transportation and storage.

One local scavenger dragged off her stash from my house recently – mostly newspapers. After a heavy rain I saw the papers the next day hanging out to dry on a line strung between trees and carts while she carefully unfolded papers from a huge soggy pile.

“Rain,” she said to me, grinning.

The wife of a colleague who also collected newspapers and used paper from our office introduced me to a school for a community of scavengers in Pondok Kelapa, East Jakarta. Irina Amongpradja, the force behind the school, is dedicated to providing an education for young children between the ages of five and 15 who assist their parents in collecting trash.

Unfortunately, the local education office reneged on a promise to let them use a vacant government office free of charge for five years; after 18 months, they were told to pack their bags because, apparently, the children were not “fit” to receive an education.

The students, now numbering 150, and the volunteer teachers relocated to a scavenger settlement near the banks of a river and built a simple bamboo structure.

Seeing the garbage-clogged river I asked Ibu Novi, the operational head of the school, whether the scavengers were responsible for the damage to the environment.

“No, the local neighborhood chief has given instructions for the community’s garbage to be thrown into the river,” she said.

And yes, the area was inundated during the February floods – highlighting another of Jakarta’s “inconvenient truths”.

+ Melinda Hewitt

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