Awash in Trash
	As Asians get richer and consume more, they are producing unprecedented quantities of rubbish. So where does it all end up?
	By Liam Fitzpatrick

	KEMAL JUFRI / POLARIS FOR TIME  SEA OF TROUBLES: So much junk is dumped in the Angke River that itŐs possible in parts to walk on water by stepping from one piece of trash to the next

Posted Monday, October 2, 2006; 20:00 HKT
To describe trash as a rising tide, swamping the communities that produce it, may be a cliché—but in Jakarta it's perfectly true. An estimated 70%—or 1,200 cubic meters—of the Indonesian capital's daily waste gets dumped into the city's canals, most of which lead to the Angke River estuary in North Jakarta. This is the reeking drainpipe for a city of 10 million people. Picture a broad, black and noxious channel, moving with the viscous sloth of an oil spill, and pushing all the jetsam of 21st century life before it: outmoded appliances, last season's clothing, the flyblown remains of yesterday's dinners. The trash is thick enough in parts to allow the river to be forded. People who know the area well can hop across the sludge, leaping from discarded sofa to jettisoned fridge like creatures evolved for life in some ghastly, Ballardian end time.

The Angke River terminates in Jakarta Bay, one of the most evil-looking stretches of water on earth. When an old shoe gets caught in the propeller of a boat chartered by TIME to explore the bay, the driver leaps overboard to free up the blades—and finds himself standing in water up to his knees. Ahmad Suwandi, a conservationist at Fauna & Flora International who is also on the boat, remarks: "This part of the bay should be about 30 m deep." Instead, he says, the water here is so filled with rubbish that you can actually walk on it "all the way to the airport about 15 km away."

Strikingly, people are quite prepared to live with the Angke—and not just those whose poverty affords them no alternative to a riverfront hovel. North Jakarta is considered geomantically auspicious by the city's Indonesian-Chinese community. As a result, some of the capital's wealthiest homes—gaudy mansions the size of small shopping malls—back onto the terrible waterway. Fishermen bathe in the water and use it for cooking. Boiled clams, a popular lunch, are prepared in Angke River water before being sold to local schoolchildren and workers. You might have thought that the state of the river—which passes through a supposedly protected 1,300-hectare greenbelt and a wildlife reserve—would have aroused impassioned protests from businesses and property owners, but no. In Jakarta, as in many parts of Asia, the most common way of coping with trash is to simply lower one's environmental expectations. You would be surprised how quickly people get used to trudging over landfills and scuttling across dead rivers.

In a grim sense, that's lucky—because Asia's rapid economic growth will continue to produce an all but unstoppable tide of refuse. "When the economy is growing, people have more to spend and use more, so they throw away more trash," says Vu Duc A, a solid-waste manager with Hanoi's Department of Natural Resources and Environment. The Vietnamese capital, which is a key beneficiary of the nation's economic boom, is a perfect example of the environmental challenges exacerbated by success. The average resident of Hanoi throws out 0.85 kg of trash per day, up from 0.44 kg in 1996; by the end of this decade, the figure is forecast to jump to 1.3 kg as rising wealth spawns greater consumption. The city's main landfill, the Nam Son dump site, is just seven years old but is already being expanded by 43 hectares to cope with the grimy avalanche. In wealthier Ho Chi Minh City, people already produce about 1 kg of trash daily, and about 10% of it ends up in the city's canals.

Hobbled by poor planning, poor environmental education and scant resources, other developing nations have created their own toxic sinkholes—from the computer scrapyards of Bangalore to the hummocks of garbage that make up Manila's Smokey Mountain. Strategies to cope with such problems have yet to emerge. Less than 5% of waste in India or the Philippines is incinerated or buried in landfills: the rest ends up at open dumps. In any case, incineration, with its attendant pollution problems, is no panacea. Meanwhile, recycling is still in its infancy in Asia. Of the 900,000 tons of trash generated annually in Hanoi, just 50,000 tons are recycled—a meager proportion but one comparable to that of many of the region's developing cities. Indeed, according to the Beijing Environmental Protection Foundation, the volume of paper discarded annually in the Chinese capital alone could, if recycled, produce 330,000 tons of new paper—the same amount generated by one million cubic meters of timber.

Continued...

	Learning to Fly Green [Sep. 25, 2006] Air travel can be an environmentally dirty business. A couple tips on making it cleaner Dangerous Dive [Jul. 10, 2006] The perils and politics of swimming in China's Pearl River Still Losing a Harbor [Jun. 19, 2006] Hong Kong has a rare opportunity to fix its unwelcoming waterfront. Think it will take it? China's Toxic Shock [Nov. 27, 2005] A huge chemical spill shuts down a city's water--and another clumsy official cover-up is exposed The Middle Landfill [Nov. 17, 2003] China's economy vs. its environment More Related Items | Search all issues of TIME Magazine