Made in Australia: our rubbish lobs in Java’s backyard

AMANDA HODGE

NIVELL RAYDA

MAY 27, 2019

The Australian

It takes only seconds of picking through the wasteland of imported rubbish that blankets whole villages and former farmland in Indonesia’s East Java to spot Australia’s contribution.

Coles bags, packets of Smith’s chips, plastic milk bottles from Woolworths, Omo washing machine detergent bags and even a discarded blue Northern Territory rugby league jersey with “Dave’s Painting Service” printed across the chest are easy to spot among the detritus.

“I see a lot of Australian, American and English rubbish … bottles, food packets, a bit of everything,” says one waste picker, Sucipto, who sorts barehanded through the piles of plastic rubbish he buys from a nearby paper mill for a return of roughly $50 a week.

Indonesia is already the second-largest export destination for Australian waste since Beijing closed its doors to foreign rubbish imports early last year to deal with its own waste and pollution issues — and in doing so created a global waste crisis.

Australia found alternative export destinations in India, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam, but all four have since announced crackdowns on foreign waste.

Indonesia is considering similar action after a recent audit by a local environment coalition concluded thousands of tonnes a month of additional plastic waste were being smuggled by foreign countries — including Australia — into East Java’s Tanjung Perak port among waste paper shipments destined for provincial paper mills. Its findings — including that 30 per cent of all material shipped to the province as recycled paper was scrap plastic — were confirmed by Indonesia’s environment ministry, which this month proposed a ban on all imported plastic scrap by 2022.

Under amendments passed this month to the international Basel Convention on transboundary waste, all signatory nations must seek permission before exporting plastic waste to another country, and ensure it has the ­capacity to manage it.

Indonesian activists hope the agreement, signed by more than 130 nations, including Australia and Indonesia, will stamp out the smuggling of waste.

Australian waste management companies Auswaste and Cleanaway, both of which export millions of kilograms of paper scrap to East Java, say they have no involvement in the illicit practice.

Cleanaway told The Australian it had never had a shipment rejected by Indonesia on the grounds of contamination and “every waste shipment sent by Cleanaway to Indonesia is inspected and approved prior to export by local contractors for Indonesian Customs”.

Auswaste managing director Vincent Liang said: “We believe material we send to Indonesia and other destinations will be recycled in a proper manner.”

Both companies said they regularly audited their export shipments to guard against contamination. But Yuyun Ismawati Drwiega, whose Nexus3Foundation worked on the East Java audit with Ecoton and helped stage a protest outside Australia’s Surabaya consulate last month, questioned how else to explain plastic content of as much as 30 per cent inside paper shipments from Australia and other countries.

Ecoton spokesman Prigi Arisandi said recent heightened scrutiny of the practice in East Java had forced paper mills to begin storing the scrap plastic on site, and truck movements out of the mills have slowed. But at Bangun village, where almost every house is marooned in a sea of shredded plastic, Giman tells The Australian he is still doing brisk business sorting and drying plastic waste from countries such as Singapore, Australia and the US.

“As long as the paper mills are still operating they will produce a lot of waste like this. We even find foreign money,” he says as smoke pours from one of his waste piles.

At a nearby dump site, one man pulls three torn Australian $100 bills from his pocket.

For Giman and his neighbours, it is the quickest way to make money — much faster than growing rice — and with the proceeds he has educated all three of his children: “You get the waste in the morning, you let it dry in the sun and someone takes it in the afternoon. Even the local government turns a blind eye because it’s such fast money.”

The 66-year-old insisted he was not concerned about the health effects of the waste industry, nor of recent studies that found fish in the nearby Brantas River contained high levels of micro­plastics from burning off.

Only those “jealous of the economic opportunities it’s given this village” complain of health problems, he said.

Certainly Bangun — a dystopian vision to Western eyes — has become an economic role model in this impoverished region where other communities have followed its lead and turned their own villages and rice fields into wastelands.

Nothing goes to waste, they insist, though the bulk of the shredded foreign plastic that dries in former fields and frontyards ends up in furnaces across East Java fuelling local tofu factories.

The tofu industry switched from burning wood to cheaper, longer-burning plastic about 15 years ago and in Tropodo — a village at the centre of East Java’s tofu production — the effects are toxic. Acrid black smoke pours from chimneys, catching throats, stinging eyes and blanketing the community in grey ash.

“Sometimes people complain about the smoke and liquid waste. Sometimes it’s us who complains,” one worker Kasning told The Australian.

“We tell the boss, ‘this waste doesn’t smell good’ and he lets us switch to wood for a day.”

Across the road from that factory, children’s Koranic teacher Khairul Anam said the pollution “really bothers” him and that locals have long complained of respiratory problems and “the smell and irritation to their eyes”.

“Every time our kids cough we take them to the doctor because we worry about respiratory issues,” he said.

His house is surrounded by 12 factories, but he can’t afford to move. Only the tofu factory owners can afford to live “far enough away to sleep free from pollution”.

Khairul said everybody knew the source of the problem was the foreign waste trucked daily out of the paper mills. “It’s like a public secret, not just in this village but in all the villages where the waste ends up being sorted,” he said.

“I hope, since it’s Australian, American, English waste being used to fuel these factories, these countries can come up with a solution. I wish people from there could come see the problems we have here.”