BOGOR, Indonesia — At the age of 60, Siti Salamah started making changes at her family home in the city of Bogor, just south of Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital. “We always put the kitchen waste there,” Siti told Mongabay Indonesia at her home. “I collect the plastic waste separately.” Siti installed a unit for composting perishable waste around four months ago. Previously she would put all the household waste together for the trash collectors to pick up, typically amounting to 2-5 kilograms (4.5-11 pounds) of garbage per week. This seemingly modest amount of waste adds up at the population level. Data from the municipal environmental department showed that Bogor, a city of more than a million people, produced 2,742 cubic meters (96,833 cubic feet) of waste daily, which is enough garbage to fill more than an Olympic-size swimming pool every day. Much of it ends up in the rivers that run through Bogor. Managing this waste costs Bogor up to 24.1 billion rupiah ($1.5 million) per year in direct expenditure, although other indirect costs to society owing to household and commercial waste are challenging to quantify. Since 2021, Bogor has joined more than 50 cities around the world in the Plastic Smart Cities partnership, which hopes to tackle the mountains of plastic waste that clog rivers and fester on vacant patches of land. The Plastic Smart Cities program was initiated by WWF to reduce plastic waste by 30% before 2025. It’s one of three pillars of WWF’s No Plastic in Nature…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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