Dumping Garbage in Kepulauan Seribu: West Java

I can well remember the first time I visited Kepulauan Seribu (thousand islands) on one of my first trips to Java a long time ago. A pristine playground where you could get involved in just about any kind of adventure and the diving was superb. It still is. But now the Jakarta city administration is considering dumping garbage on an uninhabited islet in the Kepulauan Seribu, or the Thousands Islands as part of efforts to overcome the city’s waste problem according to a report in the Jakarta Post.

“The governor has asked us to deposit garbage on one of the empty islands and to turn it into gas or electricity for the people of the islands,” the head of the city’s sanitation agency, Eko Bharuna, told reporters at City Hall on Monday.

“But we’re still doing preliminary studies,” he said, adding that the administration was considering several empty islands, including Damar island, for the dump site.

He said the administration would work with an independent team from the Agency for the Assessment and the Application of Technology and the Jakarta Environmental Management Agency to carry out a feasibility study for the plan.

Eko said garbage in Jakarta Bay had spread to other islands in the Thousand Islands group.

Jakarta Bay, the termination point for all of Jakarta’s 13 rivers, has become the most heavily polluted area in the city, due to the dumping of solid and liquid waste by Jakarta residents.

Eko said the thousands of tons of garbage that enter the bay every day are only collected by four garbage boats. He predicted an upgrade of the bay’s garbage management system would cost around Rp 10 billion (US$1.09 million).

“We will coordinate with the central government because (the Thousand Islands) is not only the property of the Jakarta administration.”