When I first visited Ubud over 30 years ago there were very few cars, no telephones or electricity —- and no litter. The village was tiny, with just one road running through it. I don’t remember any shops, but an old lady near Campuan cooked duck eggs over an open fire outdoors. She served them with kopi susu, a sustaining concoction of very strong coffee with lots of sweetened condensed milk. This, along with fruit and rice or a hunk of baguette (a rather odd legacy of the Dutch) was the standard backpacker’s breakfast of that era. It was a nutritionist’s nightmare, but after a meal like that you weren’t hungry all day.
If you happened to drop some rice or a crust of baguette on the ground, it was instantly devoured by the chickens, puppies and small black swaybacked pigs foraging hopefully for scraps around your feet. There wasn’t much to clean up in those days because everything was either eaten or recycled. A discarded bottle or tin was quickly put to use in the kitchen. Plastic was rare. Yesterday’s rice was thrown out into the yard, where it was soon consumed by hungry creatures. A culture of casual littering was entirely appropriate when only biodegradable banana leaves and rice were being discarded.
Things change. Ubud is coming of age. In the 18 months since I’ve made it my home we’ve acquired a pet shop, 2 traffic lights, a restaurant with air conditioning and a supermarket that sells 3 kinds of bleu cheese, yori and capers. The other day I was involved in a traffic jam at a minor intersection which included TWO late model Mercedes. And now we have our own Rotary Club. With Ubud’s popularity has come prosperity and serious waste management problems as plastic replaced banana leaves as packaging. But with problems come solutions.
Chartered just a year ago, the Rotary Club of Bali Ubud has a membership of about 30, equally distributed between Indonesians and tamu, male and female. The Club quickly focused on the town’s most burning issue — waste management — and planned an ambitious project to build a waste collection and recovery facility for the Ubud area.
The project is coordinated by David Küper, a retired Swiss executive, and supported by the Club’s outgoing President Nyoman Rudana and its incoming President Tjokorda Raka Kerthyasa. David’s background in chemistry, production and business provide an excellent combination of skills for planning this complex initiative. When he retired to Bali from Jakarta, David wanted to become more involved with his community. With Yuyun Ilham he established Bali FOKUS, an environmental NGO. He assists as Technical Advisor in upgrading the Bali Blood Bank, a joint project of all Rotary Clubs of Bali, and was instrumental in establishing the Rotary Club in Ubud. "This is our flagship project," he says. "We want to live in a clean town. Members are all residents of the Ubud area and have a stake in its future. The Club has a good combination of members who can get things done here."
At least 15,000 people are estimated to live in the greater Ubud area. This breaks down to over 3000 households, 250 guest houses, 106 restaurants and 92 hotels of various levels. Together, these establishments generate about 68 cubic metres or 13.6 tons of rubbish every day, 408 tons a month or almost 5,000 tons a year. There is some collection at the higher level of hotels and restaurants, but 80% of household rubbish is dumped over walls, into rivers and canals or burned in the open, emitting toxic chemicals from combusted plastics, batteries and other discarded items.
The Rotary Club of Ubud has developed a sophisticated strategic plan for a facility which will handle 20 tons of garbage a day. The Material Recovery Facility will be modelled on a successful waste collection and recovery system in the south of Bali. The Jimbaran Lestari, established with the help of Yayasan WISNU, recycles about 70% of the waste it collects and is a profitable local private enterprise. Jimbaran Lestari turns around garbage within 6 hours of collection from 12 hotels and the airport catering service. Food waste is sold to pig farmers or composted. Glass, plastic, paper, aluminium and iron are separated and sold to recyclers in Denpasar. The hotels have an agreement to buy back the composted trimmings from their gardens. Only about 30% of the garbage collected cannot be re-used. Because the organic components of the waste are recycled so quickly, Jimbaran Lestari is relatively odour-free. "One pig sty smells worse than Lestari," claims David.
With this thriving business as a model, Ubud Rotary is preparing to lease some land near Ubud which will serve as the base for its Material Recovery Facility (MRF). Having already raised over half of the required funds, the Club hopes to start construction soon. By coordinating the current municipal waste collection trucks, adding more vehicles and running two shifts, the MRF aims to collect all household and business waste every day. Households will be encouraged to separate waste as many institutional waste producers do already. Once collected, the waste will be separated and recycled as it is at Jimbaran Lestari.
" Certainly there is a learning curve," David acknowledges. "We will be working with schools and at the banjar level to create awareness and educate the community. We also want to address the issue of reducing packaging." It will take a year to get the facility up and running smoothly before it is turned over to the community, and longer to conduct a comprehensive education campaign. Profits will flow back to the banjars and will be used to expand and refine the MRF. If all goes smoothly, Ubud’s Material Recovery Facility can serve as a model for other communities in Bali, Indonesia or abroad.
Returning to the issue of reducing packaging, Bangladesh took what I believe to be the unprecedented initiative of banning all polyethylene bags early this year. A Parliamentary bill now imposes a 10-year prison sentence and $17,000 fine on those who continue to manufacture plastic bags, and a $9 mandatory fine for anyone found using one. Bangladeshis are quickly becoming accustomed to using jute and paper bags, and plastic bags are no longer seen in the markets. This is a courageous move, as it means shutting down a $55 million industry and putting 7,000 people out of work. But the cost to the environment of this very poor nation was simply too high.
Non-biodegradable plastic bags, which take up to 300 years to decompose, proved to be the main source of waterlogging during the 1988 and 1998 floods that submerged almost two thirds of Bangladesh. The Guardian Weekly reports that researchers found plastic bags embedded in farmland reduced soil fertility, raising concerns about agricultural production. It was also confirmed that certain plastics release deadly dioxin into the air when burned — something to remember next time you find yourself downwind on burning day.
We can’t turn back the clock, nor should we wish to; Ubud will never again be the bucolic haven it was 30 or even 10 years ago. But we can support and encourage this excellent project. Ubud will soon have the opportunity to serve as an example for the rest of Bali, and become a charming, litter-free town once more.
