Environment Ministry Seeks to Increase People’s Welfare Through Waste Management

en.tempo.co (February 02, 2023)

TEMPO.CO, Jakarta – The Environment and Forestry Ministry is pushing for community welfare improvement through complete waste management, starting from waste collection around settlements to waste processing in waste management facilities.

Director general of toxic and hazardous waste management at the ministry Rosa Vivien Ratnawati said that currently, the public is still not used to sorting waste, thus the government must strive to ensure the unsorted waste is still able to boost people’s welfare.

“When I was younger, (there was a saying:) ‘Do not litter, thus throw the trash in the bin,’ (but now) it (the concept) seems old-fashioned. Now, let’s sort waste and process it because waste can be economically useful,” she remarked at the National Waste Awareness Day 2023 press conference here on Wednesday.

She noted that in Jakarta and several big cities in Bali, waste sorting is only carried out by scavengers at the waste dumping ground who are looking to find trash that can be sold immediately without being processed.

Meanwhile, the remaining trash, which is not picked up by scavengers, needs to be processed to become refuse-derived fuel (RDF) or briquettes to replace coal.

“Diapers and multilayer plastic sachet packaging can also be processed into briquettes or bricks, while some others can also be used as fuel. They are what we are currently developing for (increasing) people’s welfare,” the director general said.

Indonesia is targeting to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the waste sector by 40 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent through its own efforts and 43.5 metric tons with the support of international cooperation by 2030.

Hence, the Environment and Forestry Ministry has developed an action plan to achieve zero waste and zero emission from the solid waste sub-sector to achieve the emission reduction target.

The ministry is also seeking to implement sanitary landfill management at all landfills throughout Indonesia through the use of methane gas in 2025.

The Environment and Forestry Ministry is targeting to stop the construction of new landfill sites from 2030 and will use existing landfills until their operational period is over.

Furthermore, the ministry said it expects that there will be no illegal burning from 2031 and landfills will be operated only as residual waste disposal sites by 2050.

In addition, the government is also optimizing various waste processing facilities such as waste-to-energy plants (PLTSa), RDF, solid recovered fuel (SRF), biodigesters, and maggots to manage biomass waste.

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