The past few days I have been traveling to some cities in Indonesia to visit landfills there. If you don’t understand what a landfill is, it is a piece of land or a site that is used for the disposal of waste material by burial. In many poor countries around the world, landfills are not engineered and is used only as open dumping that piles up all the municipal waste on a piece of land until it just grows into mountains of garbage.

For many years in Indo the government would just dump the waste on the landfill and doesn’t really know what to do with it and about it. When the mountains of garbage is too high, they would just cover it with soil and plant trees and grass above it. In many cases, active landfills cause a lot of problems for people who live aroung them. Rotting waste on landfills produce gases that are not only polluting the air and dangerous to the lungs but also is highly explosive. One tiny mistake may set the whole site up into fire and cause it to explode. This had actually happened in a landfill in Bandung a few years ago. Toxic water out of the landfill flowed into the surrounding and poisoned the water. Hundreds of people died both from the explosion and from the water poisoning.

When my colleagues and I were visiting the landfills in Malang and Surabaya, I wondered how the government could let all the waste be dumped there for many years without even coming up with a better solution. It is only very recently that landfills in Indonesia are being looked at by the government and also the private sector. This is because of the emerging carbon credit market in the whole world.

By managing the landfills and capturing the gas coming out of the waste and polluting the air, emission from the landfills is reduced. The reduction can be sold as carbon credit. This carbon credit market is hopefully changing the face of landfills in Indonesia and also the quality of life of the people living surrounding them.

Popularity: 1% [?]