In a lot of countries in the West,
dealing with your waste, you're kind of separated from it,
you put it in the bin and it magically disappears.
Someone comes, it's all arranged for you. You don't have to think about it.
And here, you have to make an extra effort, because there really isn't a system, so you have to
think about it. You're confronted with it. So even though there's a really bad problem, there's a
positive side, because you're forced to recognize the problem. You're forced
to have to deal with it. So looking at that side of it, it's really an opportunity
for people to kind of confront their
their consumption, their pollution.
Bali has a problem about every year
our coastal, when it's the season once a year,
a lot of plastic garbage landed in Kuta
coastal. The government said this is because
of the sea tides. It's not about the
sea tides, from my opinion, it's about people still throw
plastic garbage in the river or in the
canals and they flow to the ocean, and the ocean will bring it back
to the land.
Waste management is a little bit the land of no one, no?
I mean it's a little bit, you can almost do
whatever you want without really being caught. / But the garbage problem
affects everybody, rich and poor, and if you can't deal with that
basic problem- pollution from your waste- then how are
you going to deal with these large, more complex problems, like deforestation,
destruction of the coral reef, and climate change. I mean, it's like
the easy one to handle. / If you're talking about
garbage problem in Bali,
from my perspective,
you can debate about it, but actually
the original
culture of people in Bali here, they're really
clean, in their house. They wake up in the morning, like
5:00 early, and already
clean their house, clean their yard, and
before sunset also they're doing the same thing
they clean it, and they throw all the garbage into
the area in the household
it's called "tegalang", it means
the area that you plant or grow anything, or
you grow a pig there or something. There is a special area
to put this garbage. But a long long time
ago, let's say 25 or 30 years ago,
most of this garbage was organic
and the Balinese, most
of the Balinese, are still doing this culture,
only the material of the garbage has changed.
Now it's plastic. / Waste is a man-made concept.
It didn't really exist, and it especially didn't exist before
the 50s and 60s. Everything was organic; we didn't have all this man-made
material. / Mostly things would have been packaged in banana leaves, so if you look at
the offerings, your daily offerings which can be bought at the market,
they are now being packaged in plastic bags, single use
very thin, high density plastic that is used once
and then thrown away because it's so thin you can't really reuse it.
That would have all been packaged in banana leaves. But I also think that
probably what's happened is the change in lifestyle - food also
would have been packaged in banana leaves - a change of lifestyle so that
now there's a lot more things available
on the market. In the past, I don't think, offerings
for instance as an example, would have been so widely
sold as they are nowadays. But so many people are working,
directly or indirectly, in the tourist industry,
so that, you know, increasingly people are having to
buy things which in the past they wouldn't have had to buy. / There really
wasn't the culture of obsolescence that exists today.
Traditionally in Indonesia, and also Bali of course,
most people don't want to pay for waste disposal. They never had
it. What they did with their waste was just throw it in the back, or burn it,
or throw it in the river, and those habits spill over into businesses.
People have a restaurant, or they have their hotel, and
they take the same approach. They're just like "get it away, get it away", and
they've never thought about having to pay for this. It's always, you can just throw it on the open lot
or throw it in the river, and it's taken care of. And it's further complicated now
in that you have a lot of large
hotels that produce a huge amount of waste, and there's actually a lot of valuable stuff in that waste.
And you have an informal scavenging sector that approach the
hotels and businesses and say, "We will provide waste services for you
for free, and we'll buy the waste."
And what they're really interested in, they're actually buying the waste, they're buying access to the recyclables.
So they're taking the stuff of value, but the stuff that has not value, guess where it goes:
in the river, on the side of the road, wherever. You really get what you pay for
and if you're selling you're waste or paying very little, you're going to have a dirty island.
And for the tourism sector, obviously it's in their interest not to have a dirty island.
So they have to make that leap and start realizing that if they want to have this thing
taken care of, the stuff that doesn't have value, you're going to have to pay for it.
Also another problem that we have in Bali is that plastic waste is often burned.
and this can create all sorts of problems. Respiratory
illnesses are the number one reported illness
in Bali. And if you're breathing in
plastic waste that's being burned, particularly
at the speed that it's being burned, because it's not
a high heat burning, which is less toxic, but it's
usually a smoldering slow burning heap, so
this can create all sorts of problems for human health and air quality.
I mean think of all these things we have that
are really pointless. A plastic bag, you use
for 15 minutes, and then it's around
for your grand kids and their grand kids.
It's just insane.
And it's not just plastic bags, there are some things you
look around, from plastic straws to
plastic bottles... I mean the idea that a plastic bottle consumes
a typical 600ml plastic bottle
needs a quarter of it in oil
to produce that bottle is just mind-boggling. When you're looking at that plastic bottle
you're not buying water; you're buying crude oil.
And then, in Bali, people don't realize how many bottles
there are. Just water bottles, there are over 3 million
bottle a day, and that doesn't include all the other kinds of beverages,
from your soda to your energy
drinks and things like that. And even if you were able to recycle
90% of those, you would still have
300,000 of them being thrown in the
environment every day. It's not acceptable. It's nonsense.
In Bali we produce 20,000
cubic metres of waste everyday. And if we say that 15% of that is
plastic, then that means we're producing
3,000 cubic metres of plastic waste everyday.
I think that it's an incredibly valuable resource; it's mined,
oil is drilled from the ground and it creates this
product which is incredibly useful, so it should be rightly
respected as a resource, and used and used and reused
and reused again and again and again. Our argument
as a campaign is not with plastic; it's about our consumption,
and our habits around this disposable
culture that we've created. / I mean people come to Bali
and they've looked at the brochure; they've heard about it or read about it,
and seen stuff, and they have this image of what Bali is,
and there have been a few times where they've been
quite shocked at what happens, what actually is the situation. There
was a story, where I was asked to help with this hotel, they had had a
problem with garbage that right in front of their hotel entrance, literally,
there was a huge garbage dump, and it would burn almost every
day, and the smoke would go right through the hotel's lobby,
and through their restaurant and through to the beach, and it wasn't good for business,
as you might suspect. So they had tried every, they had called
every government office, I think even calling up to the Governor to help deal with this problem,
and nothing every happened. And so out of desperation they asked for help, and
I went down there and did a quick little survey,
you know, I was working for an NGO back then and they were willing to pay us to do it,
and at the time we thought quite a bit. If we knew how much money they were losing
we would have asked for more. But we did a survey of what was going on
and what we discovered was that most of the garbage burning in front of the hotel was their own,
that they had created their own problem. And why that happened was they were
selling their garbage to the local trash guy
and he was just taking what he wanted out of it and dumping everything in the traditional dump.
In fact, the dump had been there before the hotel.
So no one in the hotel had bothered to go across the street and look, and they would have seen their logo.
They would have seen it. And their reaction at first was, "well, let's fire
this guy and get rid of him," and I said, no, that's not going to work. If you replace him
it's going to be the same thing. The problem is not this guy dumping here, the problem
is you're asking him to pay for this garbage.
You should be paying him to take care of it properly, to dump it at
the landfill; a novel idea! I mean they really
were kind of accustomed to selling their garbage. It's completely crazy!
And they realized that they needed to change,
and it was easy to make the decision, because they were losing tens of thousands
of dollars a day. I mean, they were losing a lot of money. So to switch over and pay
a local guy a few hundred dollars a month to take care of it made a
lot of sense. / So every year, Bali has I think it's
4 million domestic tourists and 3 million international tourists.
Now on top of that, we have a population that's just about reached
4 million. So you think of that in terms of
the resources that every tourist
uses, and it's estimated that a tourist will consume 4 times the amount
of an average local person. What's happening with all
the rubbish they're producing? / There might be a dump nearby that's
by a river that's going out, and you're wondering why there's all this garbage in the ocean.
It might be coming from the places where you're staying,
or eating at. / One of the main
proponents against the illegal dumping was always saying,
"they make the money in Ubud, and we get the trash."
You know, maybe it's the location of it,
and also the agreement and acceptance of
the past decision makers to allow the trash
to come in. So they said, "oh great, we have a place, and there's an agreement,
and look, our trash is actually helping you to build a road,
that's going to connect it to land that
was otherwise inaccessible." So, I truly
believe that they felt there was a mutual benefit
exchange happening. It only was until
recently that they realized maybe this deal isn't so good,
and put a stop to it, and
the kepala desa, the head of the village, was actually able to implement that,
and endorse it and make it happen.
I think the Bali government has already made a road map: "Bali go Clean and Green".
It's like the big agenda in our government;
how to make Bali more sustainable, more eco,
more green, you know. Actually if we see
the road map, it's already good. I mean, the short term
planning, the medium term planning, the long term planning, it's already good.
And then, the policy of this
planning, is based on the 3 big main
agenda. First, education, formal or informal.
And the second: involve the private sector. I mean,
like companies, or the corporations that make
business in Bali, because tourism is the most
main business, but also the garbage or the
pollution is also made by this big industry.
And the third is
involve the peoples' action. I mean,
the community action. / There's actually a lot of people out there that are
concerned about the problem, but they don't know what to do, and they're completely,
you know, frustrated with it. And when you start setting these examples
they see that and then they come to you, and that's what's happening.
I believe there are lots of grassroots movements
in Bali, made by NGOs
or made by just social local
organizations, already making a good movement about
and making awareness to the locals
on how to separate the garbage
and how to make compost from the organic
garbage, but right now, from
my perspective, it's just a small movement.
So, I think to make it effective,
we should involve, or put social pressure on,
the government to make a local law, like 'perdau' or 'awig awig'
to make it more significant, to make a more significant change,
I mean, to make it more effective and efficient.
We consulted with the community leaders, and we heard that they have
big plans for their village to try and revitalize their economy here
with a cultural and ecotourism
program that just got launched about a year and a half ago.
In addition to helping them to kind of
formulate their tourism program, because they asked us for some
advice from a foreigner perspective,
we also gave advice on the waste management stuff, which
the community had been working on, some members of the community had been working on
for 15 years, because this illegal dump site
started about 15 years ago, and there are people in the community that have
protested against it since then.
Coincidentally, about
a year after we started the project in this community, the illegal dump
site had been shut down after 15 years of operating,
which, for us, felt like a monumental success for the village
to achieve that. It was really quite a big deal.
Still, it's not perfect right now, because
you know, the waste still has to be handled, but the decision to stop
the incoming 14 trucks a day of waste
from outside of this village that's not even theirs was a huge
decision that we felt really proud of
the people for being able to achieve that.
I definitely think it could be replicated in other villages.
Of course the joint shared vision and desire has to be there.
Many times, people kind of throw their hands up in the air, and are like "what am I going to do?" but there are actually a lot of
things you can do, and you have to start, maybe small in the beginning,
but you have to start. / If you have a small organic farm
in your house, even a small one,
it will effectively decrease
the garbage problem. For example,
like my kitchen waste:
more or less, like 70% is
organic, so I have a compost box, I just put this
70% of organic [waste] into the compost, because this will go
back again to nature, you know, back again to my
vegetable plot, and then the rest, 30%,
most of this 30% not organic
garbage is recyclable,
and has an economic value, too, because
in Bali we have 'pemulung'. Pemulung are like the garbage
collectors. Sometimes they buy it from you,
from every house. They will travel around [saying], "berang bekas,
berang bekas," meaning like "garbage, garbage," and then
they will buy it. They have a really good value for plastic, for bottles, like
beer bottles, for paper, for
aluminium, metal, steel, copper, they have
a really really good price to buy it from the people,
and most of this 30% not organic
garbage from my kitchen is recyclable, so you can
sell it, or just give it, to this garbage collector,
and this 25% will be going
to recycle, to be something good, new goods, and
so only 5% is your actual
garbage, what we call really garbage. This is
like the soft plastic material, like biscuits,
'kemasan' biscuit packaging, or plastic bags.
So, from my opinion, if there's only
5% garbage going to the dumping place because we cannot do anything with it
I think the dumping place would not
be so full so quickly. / So I think the most practical way now
that we in Bali don't have a waste management facility
yet, a proper one, is to do waste prevention: each household
can do that, like bringing your own bag, bringing your own
container, bringing your own bottle, so you don't
add more waste. I know it looks just small.
"But it's only one plastic bag!" But
well, I worked with a group of students once, and we asked them
to observe how many plastic bags entered the household
each [day], and one student came
and said, "5 plastic bags". Ok, let's calculate.
In a month, that will be 150.
And how many people, how many families, more or less
in your banjar (village)? She said, "55". That means, in a year,
there will be more than like 10,000 plastic bags. That's a lot.
This happened to me, because when we're talking about plastic, for example,
the big problem in Bali, I tried to live a one
month "plastic diet".
We call it "plastic diet". Just to get
the data about how difficult it would be to live without,
to minimize as much as possible using plastic.
It can be done.
We go shopping, we just bring our own bags,
our own carrier, so it's not so difficult.
For most of our customers, we provide them with a monthly recycling report.
So, they get a sheet of paper that says, ok these are the things that
you were able to recycle: this much aluminum, this much plastic bottles, this much
of this other plastic, paper, blah, blah, blah. And then we go down the list of other
things that were man made but weren't recyclable.
You know, styrofoam, or some hazardous stuff. And then we go down into
the organics and explain to them the food waste we collected and all that, so they have a record
of what actually they are producing. And at first,
you know, they're like, "oh, that's cute, that's nice, whatever," but after a while, when they look
back and they see, over 6 months or a year, they realize
actually how much waste they produce. And in some cases, it's quite
shocking. So it's kind of a wake-up call, and it makes them realize that
yes, they are polluters; they have to think about their impacts.
I think tourists have an enormous responsibility for
the impacts that they create on any country that they visit.
They contribute a huge amount to the amount of waste that needs
to be dealt with, so, you know,
they can make a positive impact by perhaps the hotels that they
choose to stay at, making sure, asking, "ok, what's your
environmental policy? What do you do with your waste? I want to make sure
that the waste that I'm creating at this hotel, or what the hotel is creating
is ending up at the right place, not going and polluting the rivers
and going into the ocean and actually degrading the whole
tourist experience." The whole point of going to a place
for a holiday, a nice holiday, is to relax, maybe enjoy the sea, but if there's
a bunch of trash in it, then obviously it's not really
what you came here for. So you can ask your hotel what they do with their stuff.
You can, before coming here, make a pledge
to support a local organization that's maybe working to support
the environment, to keep the place that you're coming to visit beautiful and
functioning, and you can donate to those organization, those
non-profits, and support projects like that.
And, on a larger scale,
I would like to see the places,
the tourist destinations, perhaps saying that
1% of money that you spend on hotel
or food or airline tickets goes to
supporting an environmental fund, or a green fund. There are places
that have done that effectively, like Gili Trawangan, off the
coast of Lombok, has the Gili Ecotrust, so
you know, just a small amount, I think it's a dollar per day per tourist goes to
that fund, and that helps to do the waste management
and addresses different environmental issues. / Everyone wants
to be green, and basically the first phase of that is you have some pioneers
that are being green, and then everyone jumps on the bandwagon and says they're green, and
more often than not, unfortunately a lot of people are just saying they're green.
They might have good intentions, others might not, but it's just a marketing element, and they say "We're green!"
or "We recycle, we do that," but as people,
as customers and people understand that it's not enough just to say
that, they have to prove it, they have to explain what they do. And even
you know, just asking questions and that, it adds up,
it helps. / At the top of any waste management
plan should always be prevetion
first, then reduction, and then you start looking at, ok,
well the waste is already there, what can we do with it? Can we reuse it? Ok, if we can't
reuse it, can we recycle it? But it's got to be in that
pyramid of priorities. / So what the coalition is doing right now
is to encourage business to do waste prevention, we
call it Plastic Detox Bali. Our community, right
now, people right now, are addicted to plastic. They
tend to freak out, like "WHAT? No plastic allowed??"
We have to keep reminding, we're not anti-plastic;
we need plastic. But you need to learn how to use it wisely.
So, to help them
ease this addiction,
I guess, Plastic Detox Bali.
There's a series of actions that business can
take. Like first, we ask them not to provide plastic bags
for free. / What I think should be done on Bali,
and perhaps in the rest of Indonesia, but certainly in Bali, is
first introduce a bag tax. Make people pay
for it. Pay for the plastic bag. Pay for the privilege.
Pay for the mounting external costs, because
then hopefully people will realize this is not free. People think it's free now
and they think it's modern. They think free, modernity, nice, ya? "Asik, dong?"
But it's not. Because what about the cost of
cleaning it up over the long term. What about the health costs incurred by people who inhale
the dioxins created by burning it. What about the people who eat it
in their fish? What are the public health costs?
You know, all these costs. I mean, we're talking millions and millions and millions
of dollars. So you want to make waste management, or you want to do
waste reduction? Which one is more cost efficient, cost effective?
For a government that's struggling, that can't even provide water to the residents in
Denpasar, there are so many other crises that are impending on this
island, you know, plastic should be the easiest thing. Just put a bag tax, and then
when people already realize, there's already public support, "hey,
bags are expensive," then you do a bag ban. Ban it.
Ban the single use plastic bag. Ireland? 92% reduction in
2 weeks!!! They just banned it outright, and it's possible
in a place like Bali: it's an island. You could just ban the bag.
And people would just have to learn to deal with it. You learn.
The first or second time you go to the store and you don't have a bag, and you're either
forced to buy a bag or you've got to go home and get one, you won't forget again.
You know, instant behavior shift. Instant.
And people will grumble, and [complain], but grow up!
We have to be adults about the environment we live in. / Students are the
next leaders to come in the very near future, so
they need to be able to have access to
the kind of information and education to be made aware.
And often times, not just in Indonesia, but in many
countries, the school curriculum is outdated. It's not relevant to
the current issues that we're facing in modern times, so
to be able to infuse the perhaps outdated
or "has-room-to-grow" curriculum,
we feel that would be really effective, and get the kids excited.
We started to select schools in different areas, many of them were in
a little bit more remote areas, where they didn't really have any
collection service, so typically the school would be burning
the waste, or throwing it in the river at the back. We had very good
discussions in a high school, in which, without
wanting to say what was the solution, we were asking,
"What do you think should be done, what can you do
to reduce waste in your daily situation?"
And without having to say anything, because we had refreshments
around that were served by the school, students went straight away,
"This can take away, this we can reintroduce the banana leaf,
don't use that and that."
So, I think actually the high schools
should be a pretty good target. / A lot of programs, they don't need a lot of
money, but they need some. And if you could help
in the fundraising efforts for getting these programs off the ground
or sustaining them, it would be a huge, huge help.
When you think about it on that global scale,
what will future communities do?
The solution for me, is back again
to the government, because
the people, most of the people here, already agree about
the garbage separation or the recycle, all the
slogans, like "Reduce, reuse, recycle"
or "Bali go clean and green".
Everyone already agrees on those slogans. But what we're talking about now
is after the slogan, or after the
the idea, something that you wrote, the words
you have to do the action right now, right?
So what we're waiting for now, we as the grassroots movement, or
the people still doing what we believe it, what we're waiting for
is the government law to support this action.
To institute that change on such a massive
scale, wow, I mean, the government
needs to intervene, and it needs to intervene from the top
all the way down to the village.
Every level, you know, and the way, with regional autonomy in Indonesia,
ya, the Governor can say it should be like this, but then the Bupatis
need to follow suit. They need to care; they need to really care.
I think now the government still doesn't have any serious concern about the garbage
but I do believe, especially the Balinese
local government, because government in Bali is quite
unique, we have a formal government and an informal government, and they are both equally strong,
50-50. So if both these governments
had a really serious concern about the garbage or waste
issue, it would be socialized
effectively in the public. We, people here,
would support 100%. So make it real.
"Refuse plastic bags, refuse plastic bags,
plastic, plastic, plastic,
refuse plastic bags. Bali is a beautiful island,
plastic bags are giving it a scaly skin,
Let's play music, and support a beautiful Bali without plastic."