Indonesia has been entering the new era in managing the municipal solid waste (MSW) since on May 2008 the parliament has approved The Law of Municipal Solid Waste Management. Based on the law, there are two main activities in managing MSW, firstly is waste minimizing that actually adopt the 3R principle and secondly is waste handling that consist of segregation, collection, transportation, processing and final treatment. The big challenge in implementing this law is to segregate the waste into 2 or 3 parts particularly to separate the waste from the kitchen including food waste or organic compostable matter with other kind of valuable waste (paper, plastic, metal, glass) that potentially can be recycled.
The waste segregation is a big challenge due to the people’s habit that still do the traditional way which only perform 3 steps : collect, transport and dispose, and then forget it. Most of peoples are also still perform ‘NiMBY’ in handling their waste. So the situation is very bad, particularly in the big cities that almost all final disposal are still apply open dumping system that in the law is prohibited. This bad and dangerous system has cause of sliding in certain dumping site and kill more than 140 peoples. That is why the formulation of an objective of the MSW Management Law is to enhance community health and environment quality, and to utilize msw as new resources / circulated waste. Continue reading
