http://www.guardianweekly.co.uk/?page=editorial&id=968&catID=4
Cleaning up Bali Thursday February 26th 2009 Recycling systems around the world are under threat as prices of waste and scrap metal have fallen due to the financial crisis. But on the Indonesian island of Bali, where waste management has been a growing concern due to the practice of illegal dumping by hotels, one group of environmentalists has come up with the perfect solution. Olivier Pouillon, of the recyclers Jimbaran Lestari, explains how they've reduced the flow of rubbish by 70% Thursday February 26th 2009 A woman searches for food and clothes in a Bali dump. Photograph: Georgina Kenyon I came to Bali in 1991 for a few months to study environmental issues before beginning university in New York. Then, after graduating I began working for a charitable organisation in the US, but it wasn't what I wanted. I wanted to get my hands dirty doing real environmental work. So I contacted someone I had met in Bali, who was working for an environmental organisation out there called the Wisnu Foundation. He suggested I come back to Bali and help him, although he couldn't afford to pay me. That's how I got here. When I first came out I thought I would stay six months, but it's been 15 years now. One of the first things I noticed were the piles of garbage by the side of the roads, in the mangroves, behind the hotels. It piles up in the island's few remaining wild places, many of the beaches are strewn with it, and most of it comes from hotels. And all because the owners don't want to pay for proper garbage disposal. When environmental campaigners came from all around the world for the Bali climate change summit in 2007, I'm sure they didn't realise they were staying in hotels that had the worst environmental records on the island. There is an enormous amount of illegal dumping by the hotel industry, and to counter this we set up a waste management service to combat it. It's called Jimbaran Lestari - Jimbaran after a bay on the south side of the island, and Lestari after the Indonesian word for recycling. We target tourist hotels and promote responsible waste management. Most hotels now pay us to take their rubbish away, but a surprising number still resist and practise illegal dumping. We collect solid waste every day from the hotels that collaborate with us and bring it to our facility to be processed. The inorganic waste is sorted and consolidated into various categories - paper, plastic, cardboard, etc, and sold to the recycling trade. Organic waste is sold to pig farmers as animal fodder. Each day we produce up to 2,500 litres of organic liquids and sell it on cheaply. One of our biggest concerns is helping the people who live and scavenge on the dumps - there are so many of them here in Bali. They live in among the piles of rubbish in small shanty-like communities, scavenging through the debris for food and clothes, and sometimes selling what they find. They keep pigs that live off the food scraps, and which they either eat or sell on. The dumps are huge, like small mountains, and they can collapse at any time on the people who live there, injuring and sometimes killing them. Other inhabitants sicken and die from disease, poor hygiene or from inhaling toxic fumes from burning plastic or other materials. I visit the dumps regularly, sometimes bringing people and colleagues with me to show them how bad the problem is. Quite often when I come back after a brief absence I hear from a sibling or parent that one of the children who used to greet me has died. It's just so unhealthy there. But the people who live there don't understand the risks - some of them were born and have lived all their lives there. Some people wonder why I'm so passionate about rubbish disposal. It's because over time I have seen some really horrible things - the destruction of the environment in Bali and the lives of the dump dwellers. If I didn't try to help, I don't think I could live with myself. To stay motivated I remind myself of other people who fought for lost causes. Martin Luther King was in Memphis the day before he was assassinated in 1968, fighting for the rights of sanitation workers. Obviously I'm no Martin Luther King, but it's good to know he fought for the garbage workers as well. I'm also driven by the fact that my wife is Indonesian and I have two kids. I have to keep reminding myself, what kind of Indonesia will they inherit? . Olivier Pouillon was speaking to Georgina Kenyon in Bali. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
