Rubbish, Recycling and Religion: Indonesia’s Plastic Waste Crisis and the Case of Rumah Kompos in Ubud, Bali
Keywords:
religion, recycling, waste, management, community
Abstract
Indonesia is the second largest global source of marine plastic after China. Plastic waste, together with toxic smoke from extensive unregulated rubbish burning in homes and businesses, are grave public health threats in Indonesia. This paper presents a case study in Ubud, Bali of a community-based recycling and waste sorting project - Rumah Kompos –which demonstrates the potential of religious wisdom and belief to contribute to help solve Indonesia’s waste problem. The cultural role of religions in the case study is part of a larger Indonesian, and world religions, phenomenon in which churches, mosques and temples, and faith-based schools (and in Indonesia Islamic boarding schools or pesantren) have made efforts to sponsor pro-environmental behaviours at local community level. The paper also recalls the relevance of anthropological studies of religion, especially Mary Douglas’ classic study Purity and Danger, in understanding the connected genealogies of waste and religion. Douglas theorises that identification and regulation of hazardous and ‘polluting’ practices, concerning bodily fluids, food, clothing, housing, habitable land, potable water and sexual relationships was central to the social role of traditional religions. The disturbance to this long-established function of religion occasioned by the speed and scale of adoption of modern technological innovations, and of a modern ‘consumer lifestyle’, points to an under-studied dialectic between religion and waste which, in a nation as religiously active as Indonesia, ought to be included in both the conceptualisation of, and policy-making concerning, plastic and waste management.
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References
[1] Jenna R. Jambeck, Roland Geyer, and Chris Wilcox et al, ‘Plastic waste inputs from land into the ocean,’ Science 347 (2015) 768-771.
[2] ‘Peraturan Presiden Republik Indonesia, Nomor 83, Tahun 2018, Tentang Penanganan Sampah Laut, Dengan Rahmat Tahun Yang Maha ESA, Presiden Republik Indonesia, ttd. Joko Widodo, 21 September 2018.’ at https://sipuu.setkab.go.id/PUUdoc/175608/Perpres%20Nomor%2083%20Tahun%202018.pdf accessed 229 February 2020.
[3] Shunsuke Sasaki, Tetsuya Araki, Armansyah Halomoan Tambunan, and Heru Prasadja, ‘Household income, living and working conditions of dumpsite waste pickers in Bantar Gebang: Toward integrated waste management in Indonesia.’ Resources, Conservation and Recycling 89 (2014) 11-21.
[4] On the role of scavengers and the payments they receive per kilogram of waste see further Janeen Tang, ‘A Case Study of a Hotel Solid Waste Management Program in Bali, Indonesia.’ MSc Thesis, University of Waterloo, Canada, 2004, 50-1.
[5] Rinku Verma, K. S. Vinoda et al, ‘Toxic Pollutants from Plastic Waste - A Review.’ Procedia: Environmental Sciences 35 (2016), 701-8.
[6] Verma, Vinoda et al, ‘Toxic Pollutants from Plastic Waste.’ 704.
[7] Roland Geyer, Jenna R. Jambeck, and Kara Lavender Law, ‘Production, use, and fate of all plastics ever made.’ Science Advances 3 (2017) e1700782.
[8] Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Waste and Consumption: Capitalism, the Environment and the Life of Things. New York, Routledge 2011.
[9] Pope Francis, Laudato ‘Si: On Care for Our Common Home. Rome, Vatican City, 2015.
[10] On the multiple meanings, and potential viability, of the concept of the ‘circular economy’ see Julian Kirchherr, Denise Reiker and Marko Hekkert, ‘Conceptualising the circular economy: an analysis of 114 definitions.’ Resources, Conservation & Recycling 127 (2017) 221-32: for a broader look at the history, including the archaeology, of waste see John Scanlan, On Garbage. London, Reaktion Books, 2005.
[11] See again Falasca-Zamponi, Waste and Consumption and Scanlon, On Garbage.
[12] Graeme MacRae, ‘Solid waste management in tropical Asia: what can we learn from Bali?’ Waste Management & Research 30 (2012) 72-9.
[13] Janbeck et al, ‘Plastic waste inputs from land into the ocean.’ But as already indicated temperate nations industrialised first, and had more waste infrastructure before the plastics revolution, so there is need for further investigation of this question.
[14] For a comparison of attitudes and arrangements concerning recycling in the USA and Germany see James E. Donnelly, ‘Numbers never lie, but what do they say?: A comparative look at municipal solid waste recycling in the United States and Germany.’ Georgetown International Environmental Law Review 15 (2002) 29-52: on recycling as a collective action problem, and related issues of trust in public action, see further Niklas Harring, Sverker C. Jagers, and Frida Nilsson. ‘Recycling as a large-scale collective action dilemma: A cross-country study on trust and reported recycling behaviour.’ Resources, Conservation and Recycling 140 (2019), 85 – 90.
[15] The ‘core-periphery’ description of post-colonial development was first presented in Andre Gunder Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America. New York, Monthly Review Press, 1967; Frank, with Immanuel Wallerstein, then developed ‘World System Theory’: it attracts criticism, particularly from Northern hemisphere economists and social scientists, but it is still evident in the ongoing extraction of natural resource wealth, and flows of funds, from formerly colonised to former colonising nations in the world economy at the present time: see further Andre Gunder Frank, ‘A theoretical introduction to 5,000 years of World System History.’ Review XIII (1990), 155 – 248. Indonesia’s post-independence President Sukarno was a prominent critic of the post-colonial development model and under Sukarno Indonesia developed barriers to external wealth extraction, including a ban on ownership of land and licensed road vehicles by non-Indonesians, which remains in place. But the core-periphery model has relevance to the problem of waste management and other environmental costs of an extractive economic model not so much externally but internally in post-colonial Indonesia.
[16] Republic of Indonesia, 2008. Act of the Republic of Indonesia – Number 18 – Regarding Waste Management. at http://www.vertic. org/media/National%20Legislation/Indonesia/ID_Waste_Management_Act_ 2008.pdf accessed 6 March 2020, and cited by Christian Zurbrügg, Margareth Gfrerer, Henki Ashadi, et al, ‘Determinants of sustainability in solid waste management – The Gianyar Waste Recovery Project in Indonesia.’ Waste Management 32 2012, 2126-33.
[17] Amelia Bruce and Donovan Storey, ‘Networks of Waste: Informal Economic Systems and Sustainability in Bali, Indonesia.’ Local Economy 3, 2010, 176-89.
[18] Harring et al, ‘Recycling as a large-scale collective action dilemma’; see also T. Smallbone, ‘How can domestic households become part of the solution to England’s recycling problems?’ Business Strategy and the Environment 14 (2005), 110–122.
[19] Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia, New York, Viking, 2006.
[20] MacRae, ‘Solid waste management in tropical Asia.’
[21] Martin Medina, ‘Composting and recycling in Bali’, Biocycle, (August 2009), 41-2 and PT. Jimbaran Lestari (2010) at: http://www.jimbaranlestari.org visited 6 March 2020.
[22] MacRae, ‘Solid waste management in tropical Asia.’ 73 and http://www.wisnu.or.id/id/ accessed 4 March 2020.
[23] MacRae, ‘Solid waste management in tropical Asia.’ 73.
[24] MacRae, ‘Solid waste management in tropical Asia.’ 74.
[25] On the role of offerings in drawing creatures away from Balinese dwelling spaces see David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More Than Human World. New York, Vintage, 1996.
[26] Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, London, Routledge, 1966 and Mary Douglas, Leviticus as Literature, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999: see also Jonathan Klawans, ‘Review essay: rethinking Leviticus and rereading Purity and Danger.’ Association for Jewish Studies Review, 27, 2003, 89-102.
[27] On the eco-social significance of Jewish, and later Muslim, dietary laws around animals and blood see further Klaus Eder, The Social Construction of Nature: A Sociology of Ecological Enlightenment, Eng. Trans. Mark Ritter, London, Sage, 1996.
[28] Bruce and Storey, ‘Networks of Waste’ and MacRae, ‘Solid waste management in tropical Asia.’
[29] Graeme MacRae and Ljiljana Rodic, ‘The weak link in waste management in tropical Asia? Solid waste collection in Bali.’ Habitat International 50, 2015, 310-316.
[30] Bali is a patrilineal society in which the norm is for a household not to be headed by a man: single, divorced or widowed women are customarily expected to reside in the compound of their parents. Traditional Balinese homes consist of a compound with a number of small dwellings rather than one house with multiple rooms. Households headed by women, and multi-roomed dwellings, are now becoming more common, in part because of a considerable influx of foreign residents and the emergence of tourist-related businesses in which women as well as men take leadership roles: see further Frederik Barth, Balinese Worlds Chiacgo, University of Chicago Press, 1993, 36-8 .
[31] Public violence is contrary to the behavioural norms of Balinese religious culture but when expressed it is more likely to be seen as legitimate when initiated by a party who believes they have been wronged: see further L. E. A. Howe, ‘Gods, peoples, spirits and witches: the Balinese system of person definition,’ Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land-en Volkenkunde Deel 140, 2/3sw Afl. (1984), 193 – 222.
[32] Supardi Asmorobangun, interview with Michael Northcott, Rumah Kompos, Monkey Forest Sanctuary Car Park, Ubud, 20 October, 2019.
[33] For a contemporary survey of the extent and social significance of religiosity in Indonesia see further Bernie T. Adeney-Risakotta, Living in a Sacred Cosmos: Indonesia and the Future of Islam, New Haven, CT, Yale Southeast Asian Studies, 2018 and Robert W. Hefner, ‘The religious field: plural legacies and contemporary contestations’ in Robert W. Hefner (ed.) Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Indonesia, London and New York, 2018, 211-225.
[34] On research on religious communities and recycling beyond Indonesia see Zeeda Fatimah Mohamad, Noshahzila Idris, Azizan Baharuddin, Amran Muhammad, Nik Meriam Nik Sulaiman, ‘The role of religious community in recycling: empirical insights from Malaysia.’ Resources, Conservation and Recycling 58 (2012), 143-151; and Jeremy Kidwell, Franklin Ginn, Michael Northcott, Elizabeth Bomberg, Alice Hague, ‘Christian climate care: slow change, modesty and eco-theo-citizenship’ Geo 5 (2018), e00059.
[35] Research for this paper was supported by the Ford Foundation (Indonesia), Grant title: ‘Co-designing Sustainable, Just and Smart Urban Living,’ awarded to the Indonesian Consortium of Religious Studies, Universitas Gadja Madah, from 1 January 2019 to 31 December 2020.
[2] ‘Peraturan Presiden Republik Indonesia, Nomor 83, Tahun 2018, Tentang Penanganan Sampah Laut, Dengan Rahmat Tahun Yang Maha ESA, Presiden Republik Indonesia, ttd. Joko Widodo, 21 September 2018.’ at https://sipuu.setkab.go.id/PUUdoc/175608/Perpres%20Nomor%2083%20Tahun%202018.pdf accessed 229 February 2020.
[3] Shunsuke Sasaki, Tetsuya Araki, Armansyah Halomoan Tambunan, and Heru Prasadja, ‘Household income, living and working conditions of dumpsite waste pickers in Bantar Gebang: Toward integrated waste management in Indonesia.’ Resources, Conservation and Recycling 89 (2014) 11-21.
[4] On the role of scavengers and the payments they receive per kilogram of waste see further Janeen Tang, ‘A Case Study of a Hotel Solid Waste Management Program in Bali, Indonesia.’ MSc Thesis, University of Waterloo, Canada, 2004, 50-1.
[5] Rinku Verma, K. S. Vinoda et al, ‘Toxic Pollutants from Plastic Waste - A Review.’ Procedia: Environmental Sciences 35 (2016), 701-8.
[6] Verma, Vinoda et al, ‘Toxic Pollutants from Plastic Waste.’ 704.
[7] Roland Geyer, Jenna R. Jambeck, and Kara Lavender Law, ‘Production, use, and fate of all plastics ever made.’ Science Advances 3 (2017) e1700782.
[8] Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Waste and Consumption: Capitalism, the Environment and the Life of Things. New York, Routledge 2011.
[9] Pope Francis, Laudato ‘Si: On Care for Our Common Home. Rome, Vatican City, 2015.
[10] On the multiple meanings, and potential viability, of the concept of the ‘circular economy’ see Julian Kirchherr, Denise Reiker and Marko Hekkert, ‘Conceptualising the circular economy: an analysis of 114 definitions.’ Resources, Conservation & Recycling 127 (2017) 221-32: for a broader look at the history, including the archaeology, of waste see John Scanlan, On Garbage. London, Reaktion Books, 2005.
[11] See again Falasca-Zamponi, Waste and Consumption and Scanlon, On Garbage.
[12] Graeme MacRae, ‘Solid waste management in tropical Asia: what can we learn from Bali?’ Waste Management & Research 30 (2012) 72-9.
[13] Janbeck et al, ‘Plastic waste inputs from land into the ocean.’ But as already indicated temperate nations industrialised first, and had more waste infrastructure before the plastics revolution, so there is need for further investigation of this question.
[14] For a comparison of attitudes and arrangements concerning recycling in the USA and Germany see James E. Donnelly, ‘Numbers never lie, but what do they say?: A comparative look at municipal solid waste recycling in the United States and Germany.’ Georgetown International Environmental Law Review 15 (2002) 29-52: on recycling as a collective action problem, and related issues of trust in public action, see further Niklas Harring, Sverker C. Jagers, and Frida Nilsson. ‘Recycling as a large-scale collective action dilemma: A cross-country study on trust and reported recycling behaviour.’ Resources, Conservation and Recycling 140 (2019), 85 – 90.
[15] The ‘core-periphery’ description of post-colonial development was first presented in Andre Gunder Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America. New York, Monthly Review Press, 1967; Frank, with Immanuel Wallerstein, then developed ‘World System Theory’: it attracts criticism, particularly from Northern hemisphere economists and social scientists, but it is still evident in the ongoing extraction of natural resource wealth, and flows of funds, from formerly colonised to former colonising nations in the world economy at the present time: see further Andre Gunder Frank, ‘A theoretical introduction to 5,000 years of World System History.’ Review XIII (1990), 155 – 248. Indonesia’s post-independence President Sukarno was a prominent critic of the post-colonial development model and under Sukarno Indonesia developed barriers to external wealth extraction, including a ban on ownership of land and licensed road vehicles by non-Indonesians, which remains in place. But the core-periphery model has relevance to the problem of waste management and other environmental costs of an extractive economic model not so much externally but internally in post-colonial Indonesia.
[16] Republic of Indonesia, 2008. Act of the Republic of Indonesia – Number 18 – Regarding Waste Management. at http://www.vertic. org/media/National%20Legislation/Indonesia/ID_Waste_Management_Act_ 2008.pdf accessed 6 March 2020, and cited by Christian Zurbrügg, Margareth Gfrerer, Henki Ashadi, et al, ‘Determinants of sustainability in solid waste management – The Gianyar Waste Recovery Project in Indonesia.’ Waste Management 32 2012, 2126-33.
[17] Amelia Bruce and Donovan Storey, ‘Networks of Waste: Informal Economic Systems and Sustainability in Bali, Indonesia.’ Local Economy 3, 2010, 176-89.
[18] Harring et al, ‘Recycling as a large-scale collective action dilemma’; see also T. Smallbone, ‘How can domestic households become part of the solution to England’s recycling problems?’ Business Strategy and the Environment 14 (2005), 110–122.
[19] Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia, New York, Viking, 2006.
[20] MacRae, ‘Solid waste management in tropical Asia.’
[21] Martin Medina, ‘Composting and recycling in Bali’, Biocycle, (August 2009), 41-2 and PT. Jimbaran Lestari (2010) at: http://www.jimbaranlestari.org visited 6 March 2020.
[22] MacRae, ‘Solid waste management in tropical Asia.’ 73 and http://www.wisnu.or.id/id/ accessed 4 March 2020.
[23] MacRae, ‘Solid waste management in tropical Asia.’ 73.
[24] MacRae, ‘Solid waste management in tropical Asia.’ 74.
[25] On the role of offerings in drawing creatures away from Balinese dwelling spaces see David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More Than Human World. New York, Vintage, 1996.
[26] Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, London, Routledge, 1966 and Mary Douglas, Leviticus as Literature, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999: see also Jonathan Klawans, ‘Review essay: rethinking Leviticus and rereading Purity and Danger.’ Association for Jewish Studies Review, 27, 2003, 89-102.
[27] On the eco-social significance of Jewish, and later Muslim, dietary laws around animals and blood see further Klaus Eder, The Social Construction of Nature: A Sociology of Ecological Enlightenment, Eng. Trans. Mark Ritter, London, Sage, 1996.
[28] Bruce and Storey, ‘Networks of Waste’ and MacRae, ‘Solid waste management in tropical Asia.’
[29] Graeme MacRae and Ljiljana Rodic, ‘The weak link in waste management in tropical Asia? Solid waste collection in Bali.’ Habitat International 50, 2015, 310-316.
[30] Bali is a patrilineal society in which the norm is for a household not to be headed by a man: single, divorced or widowed women are customarily expected to reside in the compound of their parents. Traditional Balinese homes consist of a compound with a number of small dwellings rather than one house with multiple rooms. Households headed by women, and multi-roomed dwellings, are now becoming more common, in part because of a considerable influx of foreign residents and the emergence of tourist-related businesses in which women as well as men take leadership roles: see further Frederik Barth, Balinese Worlds Chiacgo, University of Chicago Press, 1993, 36-8 .
[31] Public violence is contrary to the behavioural norms of Balinese religious culture but when expressed it is more likely to be seen as legitimate when initiated by a party who believes they have been wronged: see further L. E. A. Howe, ‘Gods, peoples, spirits and witches: the Balinese system of person definition,’ Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land-en Volkenkunde Deel 140, 2/3sw Afl. (1984), 193 – 222.
[32] Supardi Asmorobangun, interview with Michael Northcott, Rumah Kompos, Monkey Forest Sanctuary Car Park, Ubud, 20 October, 2019.
[33] For a contemporary survey of the extent and social significance of religiosity in Indonesia see further Bernie T. Adeney-Risakotta, Living in a Sacred Cosmos: Indonesia and the Future of Islam, New Haven, CT, Yale Southeast Asian Studies, 2018 and Robert W. Hefner, ‘The religious field: plural legacies and contemporary contestations’ in Robert W. Hefner (ed.) Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Indonesia, London and New York, 2018, 211-225.
[34] On research on religious communities and recycling beyond Indonesia see Zeeda Fatimah Mohamad, Noshahzila Idris, Azizan Baharuddin, Amran Muhammad, Nik Meriam Nik Sulaiman, ‘The role of religious community in recycling: empirical insights from Malaysia.’ Resources, Conservation and Recycling 58 (2012), 143-151; and Jeremy Kidwell, Franklin Ginn, Michael Northcott, Elizabeth Bomberg, Alice Hague, ‘Christian climate care: slow change, modesty and eco-theo-citizenship’ Geo 5 (2018), e00059.
[35] Research for this paper was supported by the Ford Foundation (Indonesia), Grant title: ‘Co-designing Sustainable, Just and Smart Urban Living,’ awarded to the Indonesian Consortium of Religious Studies, Universitas Gadja Madah, from 1 January 2019 to 31 December 2020.
Published
2020-04-28
How to Cite
Northcoot, M. S. (2020). Rubbish, Recycling and Religion: Indonesia’s Plastic Waste Crisis and the Case of Rumah Kompos in Ubud, Bali. International Journal of Interreligious and Intercultural Studies, 3(1), 1-19. https://doi.org/10.32795/ijiis.vol3.iss1.2020.680
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Articles
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