December 7, 2007

Report From Bali - Hotel Waste Piles Up

The Four Seasons, Bali Inter-Continental and Ritz-Carlton are among a handful of resorts that are doing it right when it comes to solid waste disposal and recycling in Bali, Indonesia. As 10,000 delegates and other participants have descended on the resort island for the U.N. Conference on Climate Change, Millie Salinas and Kevin Jung of EnviroMedia Social Marketing report that local experts estimate only five percent of all hotels in Bali recycle, compost and properly dispose of their waste.

What happens to the rest of the rubbish? According to Olivier Pouillon of Jimbaran Lestari Waste Management Company, which processes the hotels’ garbage, it’s almost common knowledge that a lot of it ends up scattered about the island or illegally dumped in environmentally sensitive mangroves, or tropical wetlands.

Salinas and Jung visited a dump site at a mangrove located a 15-minute drive from the Bali International Convention Centre, where the U.N. conference is being held.

“What was once a beautiful mangrove has now become not only an unimaginable dump site but also a chicken slaughter house where a family of 12 lives off the trash dumped there in a shack made from the same waste,” said Salinas.

Jimbaran Lestari, one of the few registered legal waste management companies in Bali, processes, recycles and composts the waste of about 25 international and regional hotels and about a dozen small businesses.

“Overall we reduce the total waste volume by more than 70 percent, which means for every five trucks that are processed at our facility only one truck of waste needs to be sent to the official landfill — TPA Suwung,” said Pouillon.

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