'Reduce waste' to cope with budget cut

Tifa Asrianti, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | Mon, 11/17/2008 10:54 AM  

The city administration should reduce garbage rather than relying on its budget to finance the operation of garbage trucks, an activist says following reports that the city budget will be lower next year. 

Bagong Suyoto, head of the coalition for national garbage management, said the smaller budget would not pose a problem if the administration implemented a 3R (reduce, reuse and recycle) program in the trade, industry and education sectors. 

"The city administration should also enforce the Garbage Law by drafting a bylaw on extended producer responsibility (EPR), so each producer recycles the garbage that results from their products," he said. 

In the 2009 draft budget, the city sanitation agency asked for Rp 568.34 billion (US$47.93 million), about Rp 23 billion less than the budget this year. In 2007, the budget was Rp 710.26 billion. 

Bagong said the city administration should also encourage more communities to process their own garbage by allocating funds for neighborhood waste management units. 

"If the administration uses this approach, they can save the agency up to 30 percent," he said. 

Eko Bharuna, the agency's head, said local communities had helped process 8 percent of the city's total garbage produced this year, or between 450 and 500 tons of garbage. 

"We aim to raise the figure up to 20 percent over the next five years. It is hard to encourage the public to process garbage, so we still have to transport garbage to the dump," he said. 

Jakarta produces 6,000 tons of garbage per day. The garbage volume is predicted to reach 6,894 tons per day in 2010 and 8,210 tons per day in 2025, according to a sanitation agency report. 

However, the rising volume of garbage has not been followed by an increase in the number of dump trucks. 

The agency has 795 trucks, with 336 trucks aged between 10 and 15 years and 197 trucks above 15 years. Eko said that with the current load, the city needed 1,000 trucks. 

Eko said the older trucks could only make one trip to Bantar Gebang dump in Bekasi, West Java, each day. As a result, he added, the volume of remaining garbage reached 10 percent or between 1,500 tons and 1,600 tons per day. 

He said the budget decrease could cause more garbage to be left behind because it would not cover for the cost of fuel. 

When the gasoline price was Rp 4,500 per liter, the budget for the operational costs of the trucks was Rp 28 billion for 2008, he said. 

"There are fixed items in our agency's budget, such as tipping fee and truck operational costs. The reduced budget can only cover us until September 2009, so there won't be any budget for the last three months. We will try to get more budget during the revision period," he said. 

Sayogo Hendrosubroto, a councilor from Commission D overseeing development, said the last couple of budgets proposed by the sanitation agency were too small. 

"We always ask for budget details and calculations from the sanitation agency, but they never give them to us. The budget is still under deliberation, there is still room for change," he said.