Greening the Island of the Gods

A short documentary film dumpster diving into Bali's garbage crisis and its grassroots solutions. For more info, visit: http://www.theparadigmshiftproject.org/greening_the_island_of_the_gods.html

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."