Monday, Oct. 02, 2006

Awash in Trash

By Liam Fitzpatrick

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.

If tackling waste management is a headache for governments, it is a Sisyphean impossibility for the region's under-resourced environmentalists. "Giving up should be the furthest thing from our minds," says Von Hernandez, head of the Philippine Clean Air Coalition. But important legislative victories tend to be stymied by feeble execution, a lack of resources or the meddling of vested interests. Hernandez's campaigning led to the passing of the 1999 Philippine Clean Air Act, which officially made the country the first in the world to ban the use of incinerators in waste disposal. But in reality the legislation is a farce. A powerful lobby of congressmen, local officials and incinerator operators is working to have it repealed?and, says Hernandez, no money has ever been allocated for the act's enforcement.

The statistics from China are the most daunting of all. The world's most populous nation produces 150 million tons of trash annually, with the volume of garbage from its cities surging by almost 9% a year since 1979?and by almost 20% in a metropolis like Beijing. Today, most of the Chinese capital's refuse?4.95 million tons a year?is sent straight to the city's 490 landfills. Of these, 231 were recently found to pose a medium- to high-level health risk to surrounding areas, triggering increased rates of cancers and respiratory illnesses. "The smell was so bad that we puked all the time when the [landfill] first moved here," says Li Xiuying, 62, of the Asuwei landfill that opened 60 km north of Beijing in 1994. "No matter how warm the weather is, we dare not open any windows," adds her neighbor Wang Yucang. Both of them say that some elderly people in Asuwei village have breathing difficulties. The situation is mirrored all over the country as unprecedented levels of construction, factory production and consumption take their toll. Around 65% of Chinese cities are ringed by landfills.

In this developmental epoch of Asian history, commercial expedience and opportunism have tended to trump everything else. So it's fitting, perhaps, that the exploitation of waste for profit is one of the few shoots of hope pushing up from the compost. Waste-management firms like Singapore's SembEnviro and India's Ramky Group are generating healthy income from refuse-disposal contracts and waste-to-energy schemes across Asia. Ramky has watched its revenues rocket from a mere $130,000 in 1994, its first year of operation, to nearly $130 million in 2005. But unless this kind of profit potential is coupled with the political will to draw up waste-management legislation where none exists?and enforce it where it does?Asia's trash will continue killing people and destroying communities. Literally. In 2005, mountains of refuse at the Cimahi city dump, just outside Jakarta, collapsed onto nearby residents, killing 141. And in 2002, the Angke River was so choked with rubbish that it broke its banks, sweeping away shacks and shantytowns and leaving thousands homeless.

The forces arrayed against this deluge are hopelessly outmatched. Out in the Angke estuary, two solitary rangers are defending the integrity of 25 hectares of swamps and mangroves known as the Muara Angke Wildlife Reserve. Wawan is just 18 years old, but the ranger's life has already made him a cynic. "Officials only come here once a year," he says. "They only come when it is time for the annual Clean City awards." The reality that he lives with the rest of the year is that the reserve is suffocating under the black sludge that seeps in freely from the Angke. The buildup of fresh water?unable to find a path to the sea that has not been blocked by waste?kills off the mangroves by affecting the salinity levels on which the trees depend. Yet Wawan maintains his thankless, lonely guard?a young David braced before the Goliath of Jakarta's trash. Only this time, nobody's expecting a miracle.