The Ministry of Environment for Indonesia has issued new regulations that will prevent landfill sites across Bali from receiving waste that comes from hotels, restaurants, and cafes.
The Director of Waste Management for the Ministry of Environment, Norma Tahar, has been in Bali this week, visiting the island’s biggest open landfill sites.
The hospitality sector in Bali is one of the biggest contributors to local landfill sites.
While there are localized recycling plants across the island, and many resorts, hotels, and tourism businesses have policies in place to minimize waste, the fact of the matter is that every day tonnes upon tonnes of waste from the tourism sector ends up at Bali’s landfill sites.
As almost all landfill sites and recycling plants are running at capacity, major changes have been needed for some time, and now it seems they have arrived.
Suwung TPA, Bali’s biggest open landfill site, which sits close to the resorts of Kuta and Sanur, is widely acknowledged to be at capacity and is still accepting more trash every day.
In October 2023, major fires broke out across the trash mountain and smouldered for days, covering much of the central southwest coast of Bali and Denpasar City with toxic fumes. The height of the trash mountain now sits at 35 meters above ground level and is many meters deep below ground level, too.
There are hopes that the policy forces businesses that produce waste to take full responsibility for how it is processed, whether that be drastically reducing the use of inorganic materials, increasing recycling, separating organic from inorganic waste, and creating localized composting systems.
Tahar also spoke to the press to confirm that the dialogue over formal and finally closing Suwung TPA once and for all will be intensified over the coming months.
Tahar told reporters, “We will intensively discuss land options outside Denpasar and Badung Regency. Hopefully, in the near future, we will come to a permanent decision which is fixed.
Speaking earlier this year, the Head of Bali Provincial Environment and Forestry Office, I Made Teja, explained, “Our landfills are in an overloaded condition. Based on the research results of the Minister of Public Works and Public Housing, the current real conditions of the Suwung TPA must be closed.”
Temesi TPA in Gianyar Regency, near Ubud, is anticipated to take over the overflow and become Bali’s next major open landfill site, expanding on the seven hectares of land that it already covers.
At Suwung TPA, managers are now discussing how to prevent major disasters at the site, including fires and the potential for trash landslides that would seriously endanger the lives of local trash pickers who scour the site for items that they can salvage, recycle, and earn an income from.
Management is working on compacting the trash mountain segment by segment and is working to complete the work before the monsoon season arrives.
Twelve heavy plant machinery vehicles have been deployed to compact the incomprehensibly large trash pile and dig a kind of moat around the outside of the 35.46 site to capture floodwater.
Suwung TPA currently receives 1,100 – 1,200 tonnes of waste a day from all around Badung Regency, including areas like Canggu, Seminyak, Legian, Kuta, Uluwatu, and Nusa Dua, as well as Denpasar City.
The site has been open since 1984 and was due to be closed before the G20 Summit was hosted in Bali in 2022, but waste has continued to be deposited at the site hour by hour every single day.
There are immediate concerns that this policy will be hardest on small and medium-sized businesses that do not immediately have the resources to dispose of their waste by alternative means.
Larger hotels, restaurants, cafes, and accommodation providers are more likely to have more resources available to implement solutions quickly and impactfully in response to these upcoming policy changes.
There are fears that unless a set of mitigations are in place to support those businesses who don’t immediately have the resources to create a waste management strategy, more waste could end up being dumped at illegal landfill sites, in waterways, or unused pockets of land.