Fadli, Batam – The head of a waste management group says the repeated dumping of oil in the waters near the Riau Islands is causing serious environmental damage.
Tankers in the Malacca Strait are believed to dispose of the oil when cleaning their tanks.
The chairman of the Association of Batam Toxic and Hazardous Waste Management Companies (Aspel B3), Kurniawan, told The Jakarta Post that waste from illegal tank cleaning activities in the waters between Indonesia and Singapore ended up polluting the province almost every year.
Foreign tankers usually dump the waste in Indonesian waters, he explained. It eventually winds up on Batam, Bintan and Karimun islands. Evidence occasionally washes ashore, he added, such the specialized plastic bags filled with sludge oil that turned up in Batam last December.
"Many foreign tankers do their own cleaning to save costs. They just have to buy the containers and dump them in the sea," said Kurniawan.
The government has so far been unable to catch the perpetrators or prevent the problem from recurring.
Tank cleaning within Indonesia is supposed to follow strict standard procedures laid out in the 1997 law on environmental management.
According to the law, the process must be carried out by a certified company which has expertise in the field, and monitored directly by officers from the Ministry of Environment or the local Environmental Impact Control Agency (Bappedal). The cost is not trivial, sometimes going as high as Rp 50 million (US$5,500).
Based on the Aspel B3's data, three companies offer the service, but are mostly inactive due to limited work orders.
The latest case of waste dumping was reported in Bakau Serip village, Nongsa, Batam, at the end of December. Hundreds of sludge oil containers were found scattered on the beach and leaking into the sea, hurting the livelihoods of local fishermen.
The Batam Bappedal has collected hundreds of containers and will ship them to the toxic and hazardous waste disposal center in Cileungsi, Bogor, West Java, to be destroyed.
According to Kurniawan, there is an urgent need for the government to establish a monitoring agency on sea pollution, with the aid of a satellite to track down the responsible parties.
"The Malacca Strait only provides benefits to Malaysia and Singapore, while we are the ones being disadvantaged by the busy ship traffic. We must do something so as not be on the short end of the deal forever," said Kurniawan.
The head of the Batam Bappedal, Mawardi Badar, said the waste dumping had seriously affected fishermen in the province.
His office still does not know who the perpetrators are, he added. "There's sure to be waste oil washing ashore in Batam every year. We have always spent money to deal with it. However, we have limited means to search for those responsible," said Mawardi.