Creating Wealth from Tsunami Waste

	Official Bank Web Sites Tsunami Recovery Indonesia Country Website Tsunami Recovery in East Asia Related Information Fact Sheet More Feature Stories

February 17, 2006 ─What does it take to clean up after a tsunami? When the 34 meter high waves receded from Banda Aceh they left behind a waste land of unimaginable death and debris, all of it covered in a thick black sludge of stinking mud and filth.

“It was the worst sight I have ever seen and I’ve been in some disasters,” recalls Hendra Siregar of UNDP, who was one of the first aid workers to arrive in the city and turn to the task of cleaning up.

The city’s garbage and municipal waste systems – inadequate at the best of times – were completely gutted as were the 36 trucks used to carry municipal waste. “In addition to the huge amounts of rotting debris everywhere, people were simply throwing out their garbage and waste because the city’s entire sanitation system had collapsed,”Siregar says.  

Cleaning up the rubble after Tsunami

Meeting the Challenges

The tireless emergency efforts of hundreds of organizations meant one challenge was overcome - there were no serious outbreaks of disease in the fetid aftermath.

But the challenge today is not just to salvage millions of tons of wood, rubble, earth and metal and convert it into reusable material, but to dispose of the rest in an environmentally sound manner. And this has to be achieved while creating sustainable, modern systems for municipal waste management.

It’s the challenge facing the US$15.2million Tsunami Recovery Waste Management Program (TWRMP), a partnership between the Dinas Kebersihan, UNDP and Multi Donor Fund for Aceh and Nias administered by the World Bank.  

The task is enormous. Banda Aceh alone contained an estimated 500,000-600,000 cubic meters of debris. A clearing site at Tibang, one of several temporary sites set up immediately after the tsunami, looks surreal - flat brown fingers of land stretch out into the sea, littered with uprooted trees and construction debris from other parts of the city. A bull dozer was pulverizing the remains of a building, while dump tracks were loaded with earth and bric a brac. The program is also about demolition. “We have had to bulldoze several schools, banks and government buildings which were dangerously damaged,” says Siregar, pointing out that 89 buildings have been demolished since April, including a vegetable market in the heart of the city.

	Workers re-using old wood.

Tsunami Graveyard

The team clears some 1,500 to 1,600 cubic meters of debris from two of the temporary dump sites in Banda Aceh every day. The dump trucks then head to the ‘tsunami graveyard’, the final dump of Gampong Jawa. There lies the better part of 230,000 cubic meters of debris cleared since the program began early last year, as well as 47,000 cubic meters of municipal waste.

“When we stared work here in Gampong Jawa the site was filthy, it stank and was covered in flies,” recalls a young Acehnese girl working with UNDP, noting the municipality was unable to maintain the disposal sites. Today, soil deposited by the tsunami is being used to cover sanitation sites promoting more hygienic waste disposal.  

Having cleaned up the dump site and created a waste disposal cell, the next task was to raise the level of the site, so it was not flooded at high tide. The site sits at the mouth of the sea.  Using recycled rubble – a stone crusher is busy chewing concrete blocks to rubble in one corner of the dump site – the dump site was raised five meters and a new, three kilometer embankment was built to keep the tide at bay.

Some seven kilometers of road have been rehabilitated, including some 500 meters from the sea to link the port of Ulee Lheu and facilitate reconstruction. Work will soon begin on the interim Landfill Rehabilitation Project at Gampung Jawa – a project which will provide additional space for waste disposal with proper environmental and control for five to six years until a new site outside the city can be commissioned 

Women looking at cash for work lists.

Temporary Work

From its inception, the program has provided employment in clearing and sorting tsunami and demolition debris. Poor and displaced people like 36 year old Muzainah, a mother of five have been working on various clean-up operations: “We have a small farm but there is no work there now so I am happy to have this temporary job and earn some money for the children,” she says.

Muzainah and her friends work seven hours a day and earn a daily wage of Rp. 30,000 (around US$ 3) in addition to a mid-day meal. Currently, some 1,475 people are involved each day in the waste management program in Banda Aceh, Aceh Besar, Aceh Barat, and Nagan Raya.      

But it’s not the rubble or the dozens of cranes, excavators, dump trucks, earth movers and compacters which draw attention at Gampong Jawa. It’s the enormous quantities of wood, which constitute the major recycling activity there. Some 60% of ‘tsunami wood’ is good enough for recycling. The wood is turned into planks for construction and used to build furniture.  The rest is used for making brick and compost.

“Some 130 workers sort through the wood and the nails etc are collected and they sell it off to buy cigarettes or bananas,” says Bukhari, who heads the wood workshop and is known to all by his first name. So far 12,500 cubic meter of wood has been stockpiled. Some has been provided to various non government organizations (NGOs) to reconstruct schools and make furniture.

Nearby, there’s a mass grave where workers bury the bones of any victims still found in the debris. It is a place of silence in an area, which is otherwise humming with new beginnings – as seen by the new wooden homes built for tsunami survivors lining the road to Gampong Jawa as well as the colorful new fleet of fishing boats moored in the inlet.