Scavenging for Survival

Dear Fellow Members:

This editorial comes from Bekasi, an industrial city in a Less Developed Country (LDC), Indonesia. It’s a bit ironic that Indonesia is called ‘less developed’ because the country’s culture, although under heavy assault from western-style popular entertainment, is a lot richer than that in many “first world” countries. However, in the infrastructure and services area – in this case solid waste management – the editorial shows how the city is firmly in the LDC category. It also shows how a rescue might be at hand from a wealthy European country. The editorial also questions some of the motives behind the ‘rescue’ and leaves it up to the reader to decide whether the advantages of the scheme outweigh its mercenary qualities.

First, some background. At present only 30% of Bekasi’s solid waste is picked up by the city administration. It is delivered to the city’s landfill at Sumur Batu. Organic material constitutes about 75% of the incoming load and that remains at the landfill where it composts down into potentially useful soil amendments.

What happens to the other 70% that isn’t collected? That’s where scavenging comes in. They comb the streets, mainly men, looking for PET and HDPE, cans, glass bottles and paper and cardboard and stuff them into a large sack on their back. Then the scavenger takes his ‘load’ to a consolidator where he is paid for the recycled ‘loot’. But there’s another breed of scavengers, too. They inhabit the landfill, literally (permanent and semi-permanent) as you can see from the two photos. As new loads of solid waste are delivered, it is met by an army of scavengers who remove recyclable and saleable items.

There are several issues here. One is that the scavengers frequently work in a high-risk environment within the radius of the swinging arm of an excavator. Another is the total lack of concern for health and hygiene in highly unsanitary working surroundings. Neither the scavengers care nor the city administration. Photo 1, for example, shows a small food and drink stall with a blue awning perched on the garbage amongst flies, rats, stench and disease. Photo 2 shows several blue roofed wahrung in the same landfill ‘cell’. A third and crucial issue is the methane which is being emitted at high rates from the decomposing organic material in the landfill. Methane is a greenhouse gas, 20 times more potent than CO2. It simply escapes into the atmosphere as it does at thousands of landfills in Indonesia (and other countries, too). And that brings me to the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).

Photo 1: Excavator, swarms of people scavenging as new material is revealed and the wahrung or food and drink stall on the landfill itself.

CDM is a scheme jointly run by the World Bank and countries that signed AND ratified the Kyoto Protocol. The scheme allows high (per capita) CO2e

[1] emitters in wealthy Europe, Canada and Japan to gain carbon credits by implementing projects that perceptibly reduce GHG emissions. The World Bank acts as the Trustee for the money that the wealthy countries contribute to projects in order to buy emission credits, so allowing them to meet their Kyoto pledges. The credits are bought from Indonesia in this example but there are many projects throughout SE Asia and China. Almost all of the projects are in LDCs. In addition, a few individual, generally large companies in non-ratifying countries have joint venture arrangements with agribusinesses in SE Asia to conduct CDM projects.

So the CDM mechanism is a wholly COMMERCIAL approach to combating global climate change. The localized environment is likely to improve as a result of a CDM and social conditions in and around a project site, too. The commercial aspects are that:

• CDM projects use CO2e as a tradable commodity;
• Certificates are issued called Certified Emissions Reductions or CERs;
• The current market price for Asian certificates of CO2e is about €7/ tonne. Price per tonne of CO2e depends on “project risk” – high risk earns more and vice versa, as well as supply and demand;
• Most CDM projects only go ahead because of the flow of CER money to the investor(s). A high rate of return is needed to compensate for what is seen as an unusual and/or high risk
  

CERs are only awarded after the project is approved by the World Bank. Approval and validation is quite rigorous and is succeeded by strict monitoring and careful verification. In addition, full environmental and social impact statements and community consultation efforts are required for CDM projects.

Photo 2: Several warhung, and a scavenger with a bamboo basket for his ‘loot’.

What does all this mean for the City of Bekasi? The city administration recently signed agreements with a European donor, the World Bank as trustee and a private business in Jakarta to cap the landfill, initially flare the methane and gain revenue from the carbon credits. Three private companies will submit proposals to construct and manage the project. They will provide all the front-end investment costs. The City of Bekasi will receive about 15-17% of the CER income. The revenue stream for Bekasi will be a sizeable addition to its budget – about US$60,000 per year diverted from the CER flow to the private company. Potholes on some arterial roads are so bad they cause traffic jams and increased pollution. They’ll be repaired.

The new tradable commodity – methane – means that garbage management will improve dramatically as well: Part of the revenue going to the City of Bekasi from the private company must be diverted to solid waste management. And of course it is in the City’s interests to get as much garbage into the landfill for recycling and decomposition as possible. It is even more in the interests of the private business to do the same. And a little of the city’s share of the CER income must be diverted to improve health and safety conditions for the scavengers in a (slightly) more formal recycling operation, at least for those who work at the landfill. The street scavengers will not find much material in the future and will lose their livelihood. On the other hand, there will be more jobs in safer and healthier conditions at the landfill so there may be balance in that direction.

So are there any downsides to what looks like a win/win situation? Maybe not but firstly, it is interesting that the wealthy countries cannot achieve their Kyoto targets within their own countries. This is probably for socio-political reasons. They have to rely on obtaining reductions by picking the easier, “low hanging fruit” in less developed countries. My cynical side says desperately defend your footprint and don’t rock the boat by improving conditions in other countries! Second, private companies will not get involved in GHG reduction, even if the raw materials ie GHGs come from their own processes, unless the internal rate of return is 20 – 25% or more. Altruism is meaningless. And so is environmental responsibility to a large degree. If the rate of return slips below that threshold, the project is unlikely to be done under current circumstances. That tends to look mercenary.

Having said that, the cost of up-front infrastructure is certainly high. For the small Pontianak landfill (in Kalimantan, Indonesia) the cost of the methane flare alone (including transportation from Jakarta) was US$390,000. The total cost of preparation, capping and trapping was more than double that amount. No city government in Indonesia can afford that kind of investment unless it can obtain up-front money from the trustee and that is only likely to happen for a very low risk project. So the consultants who manage the project processes and do the impact assessments benefit from CDM. But it is the private sector that has become the main beneficiary of CERs. They’ve seen the potential of a new international business opportunity and are exploiting it vigorously. In the Pontianak example 17% of CER revenues are diverted by the company to improving the city’s waste management (another slightly sceptical exclamation mark there) and to improving conditions for scavengers and their children at the landfill. Does this satisfy the requirements of corporate social responsibility or is it merely commercial opportunism? Or is it a mixture of both? I’m eager to know what you think.


John Blair
Indonesia,
Architects for Peace, August 2007

[1] CO2equiv simply means a GHG measured in CO2 terms. Thus methane (CH4) is 21 times more potent than CO2 and therefore gains 21 times the CERs that CO2 does.

Peak Oil and the Development

Peak Oil and the Development, Design and Building Professions
October 10, 2006

Directly or indirectly, all the architects, urban designers, planners, builders, developers and so on who are associated with our organization are using large quantities of natural and modified raw materials. Many of our conventional natural resources are in bountiful supply. Coal, and less harmful silica and other basic building materials appear to have literally centuries of supply life. Other natural resources have a significantly shorter lifespan and substitution with other materials will not necessarily be timely or technically possible.

The issue of environmental limits to humanity on earth was brought to international attention in the early 1970s by the precocious computer modelling of natural resource use in the book Limits to Growth (1972). The authors were pilloried by the US media but revisited their resources predictions 20 years later in an even gloomier publication Beyond the Limits (1992). Critics quickly pointed out there would be technological solutions to materials shortages (eg aluminium for copper; plastic for steel) and politicians and traditional economists still dismissed the notion that the world would be susceptible to the finiteness of development resources. However, by the late 1990s an increasing number of organizations point to the depletion of the world’s resources, their finiteness, and the link between their exploitation, environmental degradation and poverty. Observers repeatedly state that the human claim on nature is increasing unchecked almost everywhere. Our capacity to destroy life-supporting eco-system services rises and perhaps the ‘business as usual’ economic model is no longer an option.

More tangibly, it seems we are in a rather precarious situation in relation to oil, according to a number of petro-geologists. Oil is a critical energy resource. In Richard Heinberg’s analysis in The Oil Depletion Protocol, one of the fundamental problems with oil is, ironically that it is such an efficient energy source. Because of that, Heinberg remains sceptical about the prospect of renewable energy sources filling the gap when the oil finally runs out.

Much of the work contained in Heinberg’s three books is based on the ideas of the geophysicist M. King Hubbert who drew attention to the finite nature of oil resources in the 1950s. Viewed through Hubbert’s eyes, the classic bell curve graph of accelerating oil production then accelerating scarcity takes on a chilling aspect. This is known as the 'peak oil' concept and it has gained quite a lot of media coverage in the last 2 or 3 years.

The term "Peak oil" is shorthand for the premise that the amount of oil (or any other finite material) left for us to use has "peaked" (or is just about to peak). Once world­wide production begins to fall and with continuing increase in demand, oil prices will skyrocket, leading to widespread chaos. How bad will it be? If Heinberg is to be believed, the impending dislocation caused by the end of the oil era will be about as bad as it gets - global resource wars as oil-dependent economies battle for control of remaining resources and widespread famine caused by the slowdown in oil-dependent agri-business. The picture he paints is cataclysmic!

"I'm a huge advocate of re­newables," he says. "I have photovoltaic panels on my roof and drive a biodiesel car but re­alistically I don't think we can expect renewables to replace fos­sil fuels unless we reduce our total energy con­sumption quite dramatically. "It's not just going to be a mat­ter of replacing gasoline with something else and continuing on our merry way. We're actually going to have to change our transportation systems and also re­duce the amount of transpor­tation that we do."

Heinberg is also sceptical of the prospect of bio-fuels saving the day. "It's clear ethanol and other bio-fuels are going to entail trade-offs between food and fuel. If we try to replace gasoline and diesel fuels with bio-fuels we'll simply fail because we don't have enough land and people will starve in the process." Nuclear power is similarly dis­missed as being fraught with too many technical, financial and environmental hurdles to be able to fill the gap quickly or easily.

So what, according to the peak oil gurus, will happen in the energy scarcity period between oil plenty and other kinds of energy plenty?

If we are to gently surf the downward slope of Hubbert's bell curve rather than precipitously tumble off the edge, Heinberg says, it will take a social transfor­mation of no lesser magnitude than the industrial revolution. "I don't think we are going back to exactly how people lived 200 years ago but we are going to need lots more human labour in agri­culture and that means the middle class is going to start shrinking."

Manufacturing will again be­come a local business in the post-­oil era as the interdependencies of global trade are unwound and shrink into relatively self-contained continents. In­ternational trade will continue but it will be restricted to luxur­ies and exotic items. People will work and shop close to home and even grow some food in their own backyards - just as many of our parents did. The intense pace of economic activity we've become used to through globalization will diminish dramatically - there simply won't be the fuel available for transport and the financial flows won’t be there either. The travel and tourism industry will rarely see overseas visitors for a long time. And inter-state travel on large land masses will diminish. The education industry will shrink considerably partly because of its reliance on overseas students and their income. And the property, development and building industry will probably shrink massively.

What do these scenarios imply? For one thing, unless the transition is managed exceedingly skillfully, large scale unemployment for several decades. But Heinberg doesn't stop there. He thinks that de-globalization is going to be good for people and good for com­munities. "If the transition is accomplished in a co-ordinated way it might actually mean more jobs and more satisfy­ing jobs for people. If you look at the end of the process it's not hard to paint a fairly attractive picture. The problem is how we get there - very few communities are plan­ning for this transition. If we just let market forces rule, the result is going to be economic, political and social chaos in the intervening period."

But there are attempts to canvass practical ways to make the transition to an oil-less world. At its heart of Heinberg's most recent book, The Oil Depletion Protocol, is the guideline under which individuals and states pledge to reduce consumption by at least the world depletion rate. Most of the developed world is characterised by public denials of the threat of shortage and aggressive actions to grab as much remaining oil as possible. In this latter category Heinberg places the US-led invasion of Iraq. But at least one country is taking this seriously. Sweden’s planning for the transition included an inquiry into energy consumption earlier this year. The inquiry produced a startling document entitled Mak­ing Sweden an Oil-Free Society. The report has the imprimatur of the Prime Minis­ter and sets out a range of measures that will break the nation's dependence on oil by 2020. While the authors admit it is ambitious, there is no doubting their sincerity or their belief in the gravity of the situation. And starting early is the best way to surf gently down the oil-less slope.

(Much of this material is sourced from the article When oil dries up, Sydney Morning Herald, September 2, 2006)

Dr John Blair