Every day, Joseph Hwang leaves his home in Jakarta and travels to one of the filthiest places in Indonesia.
Off a highway in West Java, and up a winding bumpy two-lane road past rice fields and a shanty town of garbage scavengers, lies the Sumur Batu landfill. The 10-hectare site is the final resting place for about 500 tonnes of garbage hauled daily from Bekasi, a city of 2 million people south of Jakarta. To call it a landfill is a stretch: Sumur Batu consists of mountains of garbage, the older ones overgrown with grass and weeds, the fresh ones emitting a vomit-inducing reek.
Local scavengers including children jump onto the trucks as they approach Hill Number 4 and fight each other for plastic and metal they collect for a small recycling operation that pays them the equivalent of US$35 a month. In 2006, a garbage landslide killed 24 people.
'It's a dirty and dangerous place,' says Hwang, a British citizen of Chinese descent. But Hwang also knows there is proverbial gold in these hills, which is why, as the production manager of Gikoko Kogyo Indonesia, an engineering and manufacturing company, he chooses such an unsavoury workplace.
Beneath the garbage hills are countless tonnes of methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more effective in trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. Bacteria that eat the organic refuse create the methane, which, despite being extremely hazardous to the environment, is a potential energy source.
Gikoko runs a methane flaring plant that sucks more than 17,000 tonnes of gas out of the hills per day using a web of hoses and burns it.
