The Trash Collectors of Pedungan and Bubugan

DENPASAR - Pemulung are the trash collectors you see pedaling around town on old bicycles. In the absence of any reliable and comprehensive public waste disposal system, they are the guys who, motivated by economic incentive, essentially do our dirty work. Pemulung, which means ‘scavenger’ in Bahasa Indonesia, also collect on foot, drive trucks, and act as agents who buy and sell and deal in a market of discarded items. From the moment you toss an empty plastic Aqua water bottle, until it resurfaces in a plastics recycling facility in Surabaya, where it is shredded and pelleted and then resold, the pemulung are along every step of the way.

I recently paid a visit to a pemulung area - you might call it a village - in Sesetan, an area of southern Denpasar. The area is home to many pemulung and, in some instances, their families as well. It consists of a shanty town-like assemblage of shacks and heaps of piled waste just off of Jalan Pulau Rote in Pedungan.

The pemulung of Pedungan are relatively small players in a complex system that, when we discuss trash and the island of Bali, involves luxury hotels, buying and selling agents in Bali and Java, public services, various provincial and regency ministries, and you – the reader (if you happen to reside in Bali, or indeed, many other places throughout Indonesia and the developing world).

The pemulung only collect waste that is economically valuable. In Pedungan they collect paper (Rp. 700/kg), magazine paper (Rp. 350/kg.), plastics (Rp. 1,500/kg.), cans (Rp. 8,000/kg.) and glass bottles that are then returned to agents. There are categories and sub-categories of waste, and each has a distinct value that is reflective of its relative importance in terms of re-making a profit from rubbish.

Across town in an area of east Denpasar called Kesiman is another pemulung area. Called Bubugan, the area is home to pemulung from Java, Madura, and beyond. The pemulung of Bubugan essentially collect the same items as those in Pedungan; though supply of rubbish is endless, demand is limited to certain items. Aluminum cans and clear plastics have an intrinsic material value – it is cheaper, for example, to reuse than to remake aluminum - while other items like plastic bags have none.

Though the pemulung, motivated by market forces, essentially provide waste disposal services in many areas around Bali, they are limited by the demands of the market. A major challenge when we talk of waste is not only what type of waste, but what waste is of value and what is not. If it were worth their while to collect all types of waste rather than just some types, this island would be a far cleaner place.

The Impossibility of Either Loving or Leaving Labuan

I was once laid up in Labuan Bajo with severe fevers, several large and infected skin abrasions, and profound stomach pains. Now, I grant you, the situation could have been worse; I could, for example, have been sick in rural Benin with the twin phantoms of typhoid and cerebral malaria (as a Serbian ethnobotanist of my acquaintance once was), or I could have been a Victorian-era adventurer condemned to a diet of raw rat flesh in a Central Asian dungeon (as Alexander Stoddart so suffered at the hands of the Emir of Bokkara), but in retropsect I can announce that the situation was sufficiently taxing that do not envy either the experience.

Labuan Bajo is well-known worldwide as the jumping-off point for travels in the Komodo National Park, in the Indonesian province on Nusa Tenggara Timur. For a dozen months I worked and lived in the mountains about 35 kilometers south-east of Labuan, with the Tado people in the Kempo ethnic region of West Manggarai. But that is not the topic of this brief essay, and I will not burden you with its intricacies.

By some accounts, Labuan Bajo can be considered a city, a town, or a hybrid mixture of the both. It hugs a marvelous sweep of coastline and its inhabitants are a polyglot rabble of Manggarai, Bugis, Bajo, Bima, Bajawa, the odd Javanese, a lone Balinese police officer, and various other ethnicities and sub-ethnicities particular to that area of the world. It is home to mosques and churches, to seaside fishing villages and hillside farming villages, quite poor food and some very impressionable nightlife that I would describe as charming and memorable, if a touch basic.

The doctor who administered my varying afflictions was a very commanding, if not incapable, Timorese woman from the provincial capital of Kupang. My fevers were tempered with aspirin, my skin infections with generous tips of foul-smelling liquids, my stomach pains with mashed bananas, and as a final flourish and for good measure my backside was the recipient of a fairly intimidating injection, which, if the skin infections gracing my legs are considered in tandem, made the simple act of walking rather challenging.

Over the course of several days I had made a sufficiently miraculous recovery so that my faith in the Timorese doctor was confirmed in side with my longing to again board a bus bound for the mountains and make the trek home to my village of Pusut. And a few dinners of grilled fish, made even more palatable by the addition of several large bottles of Bintang beer (antibiotics be damned) had reconstituted my strength and added the reassuring protein - and equally necessary alcohol - that my diet of pappaya leaves, cassava, and white rice in the villages had left lacking.

So I bounced upon rusted axles while inhaling a delicious perfume of cloved cigarrette smoke and exhaust fumes, happy that in this one regard (my health), I was again fit to fight a struggle that the rural poor in developing countries worldwide know so well.

Several months later I marked my birthday in a series of airports traveling from West Sumatera to Denpasar. In transit at Jakarta's Soekarno-Hatta International Airport I sat down and for several hours stared out a window and thought of Manggarai and the sunsets over that magnificent sweep of coastline, over those parched hills, over Labuan Bajo. And I longed to return with a conviction and force as strong as my desire to leave and never return once was.

Oblivion the Whale and His Precious Oil

Rudyard Kipling's 'The Gate of a Hundred Sorrows', first published in the fall of 1884 and later collected in the 1888 Plain Tales from the Hills collection, is the recollections of a half-caste opium addict six weeks before his death. Gabral Misquitta's entire life revolves around the lashes of his addiction. The opium den in Coppersmith's Gully, near the mosque of Wazir Khan, is both home and hearth, ruin and salvation. Isabelle Eberheardt's well-known story, 'The Oblivion Seekers', similarly recounts addiction to the same substance. While Kipling was a writer who requires no introduction, Eberheardt was somewhat more obscure. Her life reads as a tale that might have come from Kipling himself. (Please reference 'Miss Youghal's Sais', first published in the spring of 1887.) She fled from her native Geneva to North Africa in 1899. She spoke Arabic fluently, formally converted to Islam, and typically dressed as a man in order to enjoy greater freedom and mobility. In October of 1904 she died in a flash flood in Algeria when the walls of her clay house collapsed inward, trapping and drowning her.


In 1975 King Faisal of Saudi Arabia was killed (assassinated) in a gun battle in Riyadh. His nephew, Prince Faisal Ibu Musaed, allegedly fired three bullets at him with a pistol at point blank range during a royal audience. It has been observed that the word 'assassin' may be derived from 'Hashshashin', a militant Sunni sect, thought to be active in the Middle East in the 8th to 14th centuries. This mystic society killed members of the Abbasid elite for political or religious reasons.

In 1942 Iran reached an agreement to allow British and Soviet troops into the country in order to protect the petroleum-rich nation from German offense. The agreement stipulated that all foreign troops would leave Iran within six months of the end of the war. By 1944 however the Allies had begun to demand oil concessions from Iran. Thirst for petroleum had by no means been satiated when the war began to reach its end in 1945, and of course by that time Great Britain and the United States had changed their attitudes toward the Soviet Union. When Truman took over from Roosevelt in April 1945 the to-be Cold War policy on the Soviets began to become doctrine, and Iran became a test case for a new boldness in international affairs. The Soviets feared that they would be denied the oil they needed from Iran and supported a rebel group based in the north. The United States reacted by accusing the Soviets of interfering with the affairs of a sovereign state. The Soviet Union negotiated an oil deal with Iran and removed its troops; almost immediately Iran reneged on the deal and violently put down the rebellion in the north.

Interestingly, the oil companies know very well that in less than 30 years they will not only be charging very high prices, but that they will be uncompetitive with renewables. -Paul Hawken

It seems that one of the most fundamental aspects of the procurement of petroleum in the past century has been its symbiosis with the modern global economy, in which nation states though sovereign are submitted to economic, political and military pressure in total competition for limited resources. When we discuss renewable energy, corn fields for ethanol and bio diesel and dozens and hundreds of other strategies, do we consider that competition over such instruments of global economy almost always cause some form of direct or indirect exclusionary competition? Whether the commodity is tea, opium petroleum, or the slave trade - abolished in Britain 200 years ago - somebody always suffers.

He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers. -Henry B. Adams