The Everyday Normal: Trash

That city is disgusting.

You can smell it from 6 miles out to sea. 

It has a mortality rate equal to that of medieval London.

Which city would you guess those statements describe? Anyone? Anyone? That would be New York City in the late 1800's. Yep, just a little over a century ago, the arguably (sorry East coast people) "Greatest City in the World" was known more for its filth than anything else. As with every other developing city, dealing with trash was a major problem for NYC. Fast forward to modern day Jakarta and it's much the same.

As with any other developing city, finding ways to dispose of all the trash generated by the 10+ million residents of the city is a huge problem. Unfortunately, all of the "solutions" people have come up with here seem to be pretty bad. Most commonly, people just throw trash on the ground.

We regularly see people just drop trash wherever they are without thinking twice about it, which eventually builds up and leads to larger amounts of trash being left all over the place.

I believe that is an attempt at a trash cart, but as you can see it's completely overrun and trash is just piling up. On this particular day in the photo above, it was a "trash day" so it was collected and burned. But for the litter that builds up on a day to day basis, eventually it gets washed into the rivers and the ocean.

People throw trash out the back door, right onto the river bank.

We've been fortunate to not see too much of it in the ocean, but we have seen first hand what happens to the rivers. Directly across from our apartment is a village with a river running through it. When we first moved here the river was clear and had no obstructions.

Then one day we noticed a few pieces of trash seemed to be piling up. Then a few more, and a few more. After a week or so, it had built into a sort of trash bridge. This continued for several weeks until it completely filled the river and you couldn't even see the water anymore.

There's water under there, I swear!

Trash bridge, up close & personal

Pretty nasty stuff. The trash got so thick that the villagers would walk across it. No joke. We can report though, that the trash bridge is now gone. We're not sure what happened to it, but one day we looked out and it was gone. At first we were glad because the village didn't have all that trash collecting by it any longer, but then we realized that all that trash went somewhere. Most likely it all washed out to the ocean, so now it's floating along somewhere in what otherwise would be beautiful crystal blue waters. It's sad really, but it's a fact of life here.

What about the trash that's left on land? Most commonly we see it being burned. There are pretty much constant trash fires around Jakarta.

Trash burning day. Also known as today, tomorrow, and every other day.

Seriously. On any given day you can see up 5 or 6 fires from our apartment. They even tried burning the trash bridge!

The burning isn't limited to only the villages though. We can't leave out the wealthy folks! Much like apartment buildings in NYC used to burn their trash, many people in nice houses here burn their trash as well. We discovered this one day as we were walking around looking at said big ass mansions. We noticed many of them had these receptacle looking things built into the walls surrounding them (all the big houses have walls and gates around them). We figured they were decorative, possibly meant for some plants or something. But then we came upon one with a burning trash bag in it. Yep, big, fancy houses here have trash burning receptacles built right in. They're essentially chimneys built into the walls. It looks something like this.

The ones we say initially were more decorative and had nothing in them. Also no cats. (Image from http://www.amidnightvisitor.com)

All that burning trash really contributes to the near constant haze in the air over Jakarta, but it does give it a nice mesquite flavor!

Mmmm, tasty...

It's too bad really, because when the skies do clear up, Jakarta is surrounded by incredibly beautiful scenery.

Blue sky and mountains! What is this sorcery?

In the end though, I can't really blame the people. All they've ever known is basic survival, and finding environmentally friendly ways of dealing with trash hasn't been high on the priority list. Plus, as we noted earlier pretty much every developing city has gone through the same growing pains. Hopefully Jakarta can figure it out faster than we did in the US and they find clean ways to deal with all the trash.