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.
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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