bump and bump...

But they are Kyoto signatories! They can't have polluting factories!

It looks that way, EVERYTHING goes in the water.

The big question is where should that rubbish go? Jakarta is a city of over 8 million souls and practically no organised garbage collection service (you couldn't fit a truck down most of the residential streets and alleys). Add to that a distinct lack of dumps and you get the problem they have today.

Multiply that by the general poverty of the country (brought on mostly by rampant corruption) and I'm not sure there's much the average Jakartan can really do about it. Those who could - like Governor Sutiyoso - are either crippled by limited budgets and political contacts or crippled by extensive political contacts and dubious histories (Sutiyoso for example has been implicated in the Balibo shootings).

So while it's all well and good to cry 'Indonesia you are a disgrace' you'd be much more helpful sending money to one of the environmental movements that try and clean up Indonesian rivers and jungles and return them to some sort of cleanliness.

What do you think the environmental movements do? I had a yank friend who spent some time with one in Jakarta. They were organising canal boats to transport garbage through urban areas. I'm not sure what happened to the group but they had a thriving little mini-economy running on that - the canal folk would, as usual, sift through the garbage for things they could immediately use (food, skins from animal bodies, clothes and shoes from human ones etc) and then it would be boated down to a collection point further downstream to be sorted, and then put into trucks to be taken to the tip. The scheme was, according to my mate, fiendishly expensive in Indo terms, but at least it was doing something.

Education is never going to work until a way is worked out to actually cart the garbage out. And even then a place will need to be found. In an island the size of Java, which has 90 million inhabitants, that's not as easy as it sounds. Especially with their appalling road system. The volcanic nature of the region might be exploited, but there are no really active volcanoes within usable distance of Jakarta and even if there were no one's really sure what dumping several million tonnes of waste into a volcanic fissure would actually do. (Poisonous gas clouds? Explosions? Eruption?)

The best thing that could be done is to reduce the waste in the first place, but I doubt the Indo government has the strength to push those kinds of legislations through, especially with development being so high on the agenda.

On the main environmental groups in Indonesia aren't liberals - they're often politically conservative in the classical sense (the desire to preserve). If anything they tend to be apolitical (Suharto saw to that and it's only just beginning to change). It's an interesting feature of some third world states that their political systems and actors are not identical to those found in the continental US.

Greywar: Well that is a joke isn't it? unbelievable



AmandaP: The fact they have not worked out a waste system speaks volumes on how backward, uncivilised and uneducated they are. Disgraceful, I cannot respect a people or a country like this.



Poison: A lack of education is no excuse, good common sense says you need clean water, do not dump in it. Filthy fuckers.



Cacto: Nice to see you.
Fitting a truck down an alley is a poor excuse, a bicycle pulling a cart for rubbish to be emptied into is better than nothing. Where there is a will there is a way.

As for their politics, that too is a piss poor excuse, good common sense says you need your clean water supply to nourish the land and the people. No matter how poor a country is, how war torn or how politically corrupt, there is NO EXCUSE for mistreating your natural and vital source to nourishment the way Indonesia has done. They have a complete and utter lack of respect for themselves as a nation to be so filthy around themselves and to disrespect the river the way they have done.

They have a lack of respect for the natural resources around them that have nourished the land and the people for so many centuries (I have not researched the river, so do not know its history, subject to correction here)



Landfill sites are being used around the civilised world, whilst they may not be a perfect solution they are better than dumping in the river. They can find ways of disposing of the rubbish if they wanted to. They could do the same as China and create factories to recycle waste, thereby creating jobs for people and income etc.



This should not be necessary in the first place. That being said, yes that is one way of dealing with it.

If Sanctions or some such thing could be put in place to put pressure on the government to act. Some would argue that sanctions would cause hardship for the people. So What? If they stopped and thought about it then, they might do something about it. The whole nation needs a kick up the backside to get them motivated enough to actually do something about it.