Bantar Gebang, Jakarta’s largest landfill, sprawls over more than 100 hectares and receives about 8,000 tons of rubbish daily delivered by roughly 1,400 orange trucks. The site supports thousands of waste pickers who live on the landfill’s fringe and salvage recyclables for income; workers quoted include Rasta, 55, Andi, 29, his wife Winah, 43, Rustini, and Karmidi, 32. The work is hazardous: earlier this year seven people died when a massive trash mound collapsed and buried them alive, and pickers routinely face moving trucks, bulldozers, foul odors, swarms of flies, and black streams of contaminated leachate. Pickers typically earn about 100,000 to 200,000 rupiah a day, which vendors say pays for food and children’s schooling and has allowed some families to move children into overseas work or other jobs. Indonesia’s government says the site is well over capacity and plans to begin gradually closing Bantar Gebang from next year, triggering urgent questions about where Jakarta’s waste will go and what will happen to the people whose livelihoods depend on the dump. The article highlights both the economic reliance on scavenging and the public health and safety stresses built into a landfill that has grown as Jakarta’s population has swelled.
