Marianne Kearney, Jakarta – Cities around Indonesia are increasingly drowning under a sea of rubbish as local governments struggle to cope with the mountains of garbage produced every day.
But in Yogyakarta, residents have found an unusual way of processing their city's rubbish by using mobile and natural recyclers – cows.
Every day at Ngablak, a rural town in the countryside outside the city of Yogyakarta, hundreds of local farmers bring their prized cows to graze in one of Java's, and probably Indonesia's, most unusual grazing fields – the council rubbish tip.
The cows chew their way through household garbage, leaves and rural rubbish alongside the usual horde of scavengers who collect the man-made rubbish like glass, plastic, metals and paper.
"They eat leaves, vegetables, and even rags but they can't eat the plastic," said Mr Suropo from Yogyakarta's rubbish removal and cleaning services.
While these bovine rubbish processors might be a hindrance to the rubbish trucks and forklift operators, their dung helps break the remaining rubbish much faster, he said.
Some cows, of course, have found grazing in the rubbish tip a little dangerous. "Some cows were cut and injured when they ran into a truck, but the owners have to take responsibility for their cows," said Mr Suropo.
The farmers, mostly residents from the surrounding villages, are quite happy to run the risk of the odd injured cow because they are able to feed their cows for free. For most farmers, buying feed for their cows is expensive and finding free grazing land is almost impossible except in more remote parts of Java.
Two years ago, only a handful of cows came to graze at the rubbish tip. Now the number has swollen to 200 cows as the farmers and the rubbish tip manager agreed to work together. "We can improve the welfare of the local people as well as reduce the volume of rubbish here," said Mr Suropo happily.
Every day, the city of Yogyakarta produces 30 to 40 tonnes of rubbish, estimates Yogyakarta's Sanitation Agency. As in most cities across Indonesia, paper, glass and plastic are sorted and recycled by scavengers. Until recently, there was no way of recycling the food scraps and other household waste.
The Ngablak rubbish tip probably would have been overflowing with this non-recycled waste in 10 years' time, Mr Suropo said, but with the cows working their way through much of the natural waste, the tip would be operational for 15 years.
Across Indonesia, as rubbish dumps reach their use-by date, and residents and local governments argue over where to locate new landfills, waste has been literally piling up in the streets.
Earlier this year, Jakarta's City Sanitation Agency came to blows with the residents and the government of Bekasi, an outer suburb of Jakarta, as residents objected to having the rubbish dump located near their homes. And in Surabaya, East Java, the city's rubbish was not collected for nearly a month as the government failed to find a new site for its rubbish tip last year.
Mounting piles of rubbish in Jakarta's streets and canals were partially to blame for the devastating floods that hit the city in February this year, said government officials.
Jakarta residents dumped about 3 million cubic metres of rubbish every year in the city's rivers, said Mr Kosasih Wirahadikusumah from Jakarta's Environmental Impact Management Agency (Bapedalda).
Officials at the City Sanitation Agency estimate that scavengers are able to recycle about 70 per cent of the city's rubbish. The rest – much of which is actually biodegradable – is left to collect in the rubbish dumps.
Jakarta's sanitation officials say they are talking to foreign companies about trying to recycle household rubbish and turning it into animal feed. But none of the other city governments, except for Yogyakarta, has invited the animal recyclers onto their rubbish tips.