Bantar Gabang

In an ulcer of a human settlement just south of Jakarta, Bantar Gabang, the dumpsite for all of the waste produced by Indonesia’s capital city, bulges, froths, and sweats in rancid protest audible by all senses.  I thought of the pyramids the first time that I saw the piles of trash; tremendous forms rising in the distance, visually distorted by the dust and refracted heat vapor that hung in the air.  What other man made mountain is at the same time an aesthetic marvel as well as the physical apogee for those that built it?

Bantar Gabang, like Jardim Gramacho in Brazil, isn’t just a repository for unwanted waste, it is also the point of transition where discarded plastic meets its rebirth as a raw material in the global recycled plastic market.  Here, peasant trash pickers, called “Pemulung” which means scavenger in the Bahasa Indonesian language, hustle knee deep through the mounds of trash to field anything plastic from the fresh trash that is brought in by rusted out garbage trucks. 

Blending in is pretty difficult to do.  So, to get into the facility we spent thirty minutes bribing and haggling with the security personnel at the gate.  Our translater and guide, who I wont name, warned us that this might be an expensive outing and that, though we might buy our passage in, we should keep our story simple.

After a few hundred thousand Rupia were spread around to the various security officers and their underlings a stern promise not to take pictures was made and we were allowed passage.  Back in our van, we followed two motorcycle guards into the complex. The imperial mounds were almost alive – seething and moving and changing. The hot piles breathed noxious fumes and sweat toxic fluids. Certainly the most sordid thing I’d ever seen.

Past the weigh station and security offices, A grey road follows a sinuous route around trash mountains, a natural gas processing facility, and various drainage ponds.  The place is Massive.  The road, on one side, runs tight against the trash, like highway 50 as it twists through the Sierra Nevada Mountains, trash walls shade our drive.  On the other side are what from a distance appear to be lesser, flatter trash mounds but with proximity, the delineation of box shaped homes begin to take shape. 

Homes here are reminiscent of the childhood forts I used to build in a friend’s backyard.  Fashioned out of cardboard, metal scraps, and other repurposed materials from the dump across the street, the small homes have a certain Mad Max feel to them.  In the middle of the day the shanty town was warm and quiet. The workers who field the waste management needs of Bantar Gabang have one of the best commutes to one of the worst jobs in the world; a one-minute walk takes them from their doorstep to the pathways that lead up the trash mountains. 

This is how it works:  Throughout the campus there are about five sanctioned “dump sites”.  Here, trucks from all over Jakarta equipped with hydraulic dumping mechanisms spill their contents onto the ground.  Bulldozers, often piloted by young children, push the trash into large piles which are then passed to the top of the trash mountains by a network of large backhoes.  Like track athletes passing a baton, the backhoes swing their long trash filled scoops up the mountain and pass the trash back and forth.  In the states, I have only ever seen large landfill pits that trash is dropped into.  In Jakarta, I presume because there are no nearby peaks or valleys to fill in, the landfill is built from the bottom up, and the backhoes are the primary mechanism for moving refuse from the ground level to the tops of the trash piles. This process occurs simultaneously at each of the five dumpsites. 

In close proximity to the heavy machinery are hundreds of Pemulung workers, equipped with large trash bins slung from their backs, who sift through the tons of trash in a frenzied fashion in an effort to pull as many plastic bottles from the churning trash as possible.  The filth and squalid nature of the situation is made more dangerous by the swinging arms of the heavy machinery that move and chop, with no apparent regard for the moving people beneath them, through the trash mounds.  They too hurry to move the trash expeditiously up the mountain. Experienced Pemulung stand just feet from the backhoes and duck and dodge the rusty appendages that sweep overhead. 

The situation is actually pretty difficult to describe. It’s not just because of my literary handicap, it’s the manic nature with which the pemulung dig through the piles, the massive machinery which appear alive yet agnostic towards the unarmored men women and children all around them.  It’s the noise, the smell, the heat, the sheer enormity of it all.  What makes it difficult to capture in words is that it is all going on at once, at a relentless pace. And as Jakarta goes about its business, garbage trucks line up in endless continuity.

While the situation at Bantar Gabang is disagreeable for a number of obvious reasons, this job does need to be done. It pays, though not much, but enough to feed oneself.  Bantar Gabang as it exists today does mean a livelihood for some 30,000 people, a desperate one though it may be. 

Some findings from the field:

·      A Pemulung makes about 10 dollars a week

o   For some perspective, the USBLS approximates 75 times that amount here in the US[i]

·      S/he works around 12 hours per day for at least 6 days out of the week.

·      A Pemulung is likely uneducated and lacks the resources to send children to school.

·      More likely, a family is found working together on the hillsides picking through trash as a team.

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[i] http://www.bls.gov/news.release/wkyeng.nr0.htm

Detail can hurt. Is it presence and proximity that elicit sensitivity: being so close that you might feel the burn, affect, or change. So that, if time heals, time is simply distance – the maturing of the void between you and the sensation.

When I step back and move to get a lay of the land, the pricks, ripples, and scars of detail become calm and smooth and digestible. And though I strive for proximity, I make decisions based on the meta, on what makes sense in the “long run” and at scale. Though it’s perspective, the promised offspring of experience, intimate experience, that facilitates understanding. And when the detail is too much, I easily find solace in the happenstance of it all and write the details off as the irrelevant technicalities of a globe spinning round the sun.

What I’m talking about is consciousness evolved. Having nothing to do with with temporal evolution, I think it’s tied to an individual’s proclivity to consider the broad implications of the things around him. It’s the only way I know how to introduce more pieces to what is arguably an already complete puzzle.  Maybe it’s nothing but maybe it’s the same cerebral gap as between the goldfish and the conscious thinker, the difference between life existing in only the present moment and life being the story of life – over time, over a millennia.  The schism between that which changes little, and that which only changes, and that which both changes and trends. When I consider both of these phenomenon in tandem –the sinuous present and the docile century- I feel better about the incertitude and pernicious facade of the instant.  

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Those brush ups and bruises of the play by play just might be requisite of the passing of time – they always have been.  Read your average high school history book, remembrance is a soft read:  we wrestled with the Brits, we defeated the Nazis, and ended women suffrage.  Yet, read a chapter out of something by Howard Zinn and one realizes that American advancement was costly –costly in ways that we aren’t very good at openly talking about – at least not in any conducive way.  And this is especially true when the topic is retrospect.

That cost is an interesting thing though.  Can we justify human societal progress and the force with which a society or economy advances despite the apparently requisite human and environmental currency paid? When weighed in the moment, these costs are often justified, at least by their perpetrators.  In hindsight these sordid acts can at least be lessons.  And when in motion, though they may hurt, there might be value in considering where each act may lead.  Because maybe you can justify behavior when you count any ancillary advancement.

To get to the point, I’ve recently become hung up on whether I should feel as bad as I usually do about that human and environmental cost of progress.  Can it be, like, chalked up to the banality of man’s movement forward?  So that for every innovation and advancement, I should plan on it costing a certain amount of lives or livelihoods the same way I plan on parting with a few bucks when I go for a coffee or a beer. I’d bet Wendyl Berry would agree with that.  With each technological advancement, each new tractor, chemical fixer, and genetic change we can count on at least a few folk’s income flagged for the chopping block.

The thing is that I’m no luddite.  I appreciate and call for advancement.  I actually believe in it and want to help facilitate it. But struggle to find examples of beneficial advancement that can’t at some point be tied to some type of damage. I struggle though to be sure of whether the cost is necessarily commensurate to the gain.  And that’s the thing. There must come a point when traditional advancement, like the kind you pay for with life based currency, is no longer truly cost effective.  Certainly there is, but the point at which that happens, where lines cross, is a tough line to draw because really, there isn’t much that wouldn’t cross it.

Moreover, winners from whatever traditional system under evaluation could not expect the same positive outcomes from a truly changed system.  So, one would expect that those very winners would undermine and sabotage movement in said direction.  Progress interrupted. What’s the point.

The topic has presented itself to me numerous times throughout my life.  In Paraguay I saw hard working farmers grovel in front of an overfed and over paid politician with the hopes of obtaining medical attention that he personally had promised months before just before his election.  As a consultant in San Francisco, I showed companies how the trendy tank tops and logoed hoodies that they were commissioning were sewn together by the hands of overworked, underpaid, and desperate workers in places throughout South East Asia; a known truth that never disrupted business as usual. More recently I worked with a major food service provider who struggles to justify the “right” decision because it doesn’t make financial sense.  I never once worked with what I might consider a bad person.  Rather, I believe it was the narrowness with which they thought about their professional position that allowed enough space for bad and technically unethical decisions to be made. What is right anyway?

Though this gap is a reoccurring phenomenon in my life, I became wholly aware of this ironic disparity only recently as I searched, urgently, to find resolution to an waste problem in Indonesia.

At the time, the sting of futility was at the same instant, unnerving and a relief.  I was forced to let go – and though I wanted to escape the situation, I left one hand on the ground.

Pemulung at rest.