Kafil Yamin, Bandung – The small, filthy and foul-smelling canal in Cikuya village in West Java is the community's ticket to earning a livelihood. Soon after daybreak everyday, women, men and children troop to the waste-contaminated canal and wash load upon load of used plastic bags, then sell them to traders who in turn reap profits from selling them to reprocessing factories.
This is supposed to be a success story of people making a living out of recycling waste, but this green tale has a dark twist to it. While aiding plastic reprocessing, the people of Cikuya in many ways literally live on waste. Here in the "village of waste", the same contaminated canal water that residents use to wash plastic is also the public toilet.
They drink the same contaminated water. The horizons of their world are drawn in the curves of compressed plastic waste. In almost every open space of the Cikuya neighbourhood lie piles of used plastic bags, waiting to be brought by residents to the nearby canal for washing. To some families, layers of used plastics are their beds.
Activity by the canal, situated just by the border of the "kampung" or village, begins each morning with girls sorting out the waste plastic bags to make washing easier and faster. Villagers say they use the dirty canal water because it would be a waste to use clean water. "What kind of water do you expect us to use for washing this garbage? Clean water? That's crazy," said 42-year-old Rahmi, a mother of two children. Her children earn income from the same trade, like many other youngsters in Cikuya. "Most of them are dropouts.
Their parents cannot afford to keep them at schools," said Maman, the Cikuya village head. The waste washers work for one or two bosses and are paid 500 rupiah (5 US cents) for every kilogram of plastic they wash. Ujang, 12-year-old boy, washes 15 kilos of plastic bags a day after five hours of working barefoot by the canal, the average working capacity of the village's army of washers.
For such efforts, Ujang gets a daily income of 7,500 rupiah (70 cents). The traders purchase used plastic from the collectors, many of whom are children, who wander from garbage pile to garbage pile in search of plastic bags. The traders pay 200 rupiah (2 cents) for each kilo of this waste. This gives them a wide profit margin, because they resell the already-washed plastics to processing factories at 1,200 rupiah per kilo (11 cents), residents say.
"They are rich. And there some newcomers who become rich soon after they get into this business," said Dita, a resident who says that only the businessmen and traders get a windfall from this waste trade. Collectors and washers never get a raise when prices of used plastics rise, she adds.
The used-plastic traders, meanwhile, dismiss reports of astronomical profits as exaggeration. They say that the washing cost is two times more than the price of used plastic they purchase. One tonne costs 50 dollars for washing plus 10 dollars for transport. This does not include decreases in the piles of washed plastic that do not meet the factories' standard for cleaned waste.
"Factory men are very selective. They set aside ineligible ones (plastic). In fact, we earn only 250 dollars or so for every tonne (sold to them)," said Agus, a used-plastic businessman. "Even if they found small dirt on a piece of plastic," Agus said, the factory turns down the washed plastic. "You can imagine. I have spent a lot of money for washing. They just don't buy it." It is no surprise that "cleaning" used plastic with dirty water yields less than satisfactory results.
As Cikuya resident Dita put it: "They wash them (plastics) with waste water from textile factories. The water they use is dirt." Many Cikuya residents know full well that the canal carries dirty water. But the washers do not seem bothered by streams of human waste that float down the dark and heavily-polluted water while they are washing plastic bags. "Why should we be disgusted? Here, inside our own stomach, we have that kind of thing," Ujang told IPS while brushing plastic bags.
Though Cikuya residents are in the waste-washing business to earn a living, the trade has picked up recently in the wake of the Indonesian economic crunch that has made reprocessing plastic more popular than relying on new, costly imports of plastic material.
Indonesia is heavily dependent on imported plastics to meet domestic demand for bags, utensils, household equipment and industrial needs. But the slide of the rupiah has jacked up prices of petrochemicals, including ethanol, the chief material for plastics. The sole producer of plastic materials in Indonesia is the petrochemical plant Chandra Asri.
When President Suharto was in power, this company, owned by his son Bambang Trihatmojo and his cronies, had been protected through a monopoly on importation of chemical materials. The protection remains until now. In their effort to use local materials, plastics producers have been turning to reprocessing used plastic, thus giving the recycling process a boost. They are able to make good sales from the plastic bags they reprocess.
"They are now well aware of the benefit from being friendly to environment. If they did not go through this economic crisis, they (plastic producers) would have not been willing to recycle waste," said Maemunah, an NGO activist here. That is well and good. But it does not solve the dilemma that faces Cikuya's residents, who make money from waste but in effect trade in their health and long-term well-being in the process.