UNDP expands successful tsunami waste recycling project

About 500 Acehnese have been hired by a UNDP recycling programme that is turning tsunami debris into reusable materials.

Banda Aceh, 1 June 2005 —When the December 26 tsunami’s monster waves swept through Aceh’s most northern city of Banda Aceh, they picked up thousands of houses, household goods, cars, motorbikes, boats, shops and factories and as if putting them through a blender, turned around a half of what was once a thriving city into millions of tiny pieces.

But a new programme is now turning as much as 70 percent of that rubble and refuse left by the earthquake and tsunami into reusable materials. The programme, the Tsunami Waste Management Programme, which was established as a pilot project last month, has now been doubled in size.

The tsunami left as much waste behind as the city of Banda Aceh normally produces in over 20 years. The resultant debris is enough to fill an area of up to three football fields long, by three football fields wide, and three stories high, says the UNDP’s waste consultant, Tim Walsh.

”While it is necessary in the short term to find the dead and clear impacted areas, dumping 20 years of waste into one of the five temporary dump sites set up in the aftermath of the tsunami, is hazardous to both the public and the environment in the long term,” says Walsh.

Some 70 percent of the waste, however, is recyclable. Under this programme, UNDP and its local government partners collect the waste dumped by the tsunami in Banda Aceh and sort it into materials which can be re-used, such as wood, rubble and organic matter.

Organic matter, decomposing over time creates poisonous fluids, which in a city filled with ground wells, can poison the water table and thus the city’s drinking water supply, as well as seep into the coastal marine system, destroying it.

The waste also releases methane, a gas which can easily ignite, if the dump site were ever built over, or if residences were located nearby.

Working in partnership with the Banda Aceh Municipality Sanitation department (Dinas Kebersihan), the UNDP team has collected over 9,000 cubic metres of waste cleared from paddy fields and other areas, which are urgently needed by local communities.

The waste is then taken to the Kampung Jawa municipal dump, where another team of Cash for Work employees carefully removes all material that can be reused.

The $850,000 project, which has been running since early April, initially employed 250 people under UNDP’s Cash for Work scheme, which pays tsunami survivors 30,000RP (US$3) per day to do work such as rubble clearing. The expanded programme will employ an additional 250 people. In addition, 43 trucks new trucks and other items of heavy equipment will be added to the fleet of 55 trucks and bulldozers already in service.

“These additional trucks and workers will enable us to clear more areas of the city, and clear them more quickly, enabling communities to reclaim the land that’s currently buried under waste” said UNDP’s Waste Management Advisor, Tim Walsh.

The work of sorting the waste is dirty and occasionally traumatic, as workers frequently find body parts and human bones amid the debris as well as ID cards of victims and family photo albums.

Selling scrap timber, metal and electrical wiring has become a lucrative money earner for Banda Aceh’s scavengers, and they will be able to continue to sell it either to individuals wanting to buy timber to build new houses, or to plastic and metal recyclers in Medan for example.

The removed material, including wood that can be used for rebuilding and rubble suitable for reconstruction purposes, is currently being stored for use in upcoming UNDP projects. The rubble collected so far will be used to rebuild the road to Ulee Lheu port in Banda Aceh. UNDP is supporting the work of Provincial Transport department (Dinas Perhubungan) to reconstruct the port. The organic waste is being turned into compost while the wood is stockpiled for reconstruction.

Starting out with 100 workers, Walsh says the scheme will expand to employ 500 people in Banda Aceh over the next month, and will soon open recycling centres in Sigli, on Aceh’s north coast, Lhoknga just outside Banda Aceh, and in Teunom and Meulaboh, on the west coast, employing up to several thousand people.

“We will keep it labour intensive while the need is there, only bring in heavy (crushing and recycling ) equipment when people don’t need this basic work anymore,” he says.

Women from the villages surrounding the dump sites will also be employed under the scheme, either to clean up bricks or to cook for kitchens set up at the recycling sites.

For further information, please contact :

Imogen Wall, imogen.wall@undp.org, +62 (0)811 806 821 in Banda Aceh.

Mieke Kooistra, mieke.Kooistra@undp.org, +62 (0)21 314 0081, in Jakarta.

Sunny Lie, sunny.lie@undp.org, +62 314 1308 ext. 721, in Jakarta.

Notes for Editors:
The Tsunami Waste Management Programme is part of the Emergency Relief and Transitional Recovery (ERTR) project, UNDP’s 70 million USD response to the tsunami of 26 December 2004. The individual budget for this project is $850k.