Paradise and pollution. The two hardly seem to go together. But in Bali, tackling huge amounts of rubbish is a real headache.

   As a frequent visitor to the emerald Indonesian island, I’ve always been a little shocked by the amount of rubbish that is casually discarded by residents.

    Rivers and streams seem to be the favoured dumping sites.
Inevitably, most of the rubbish is flushed downstream during the rainy season and out to sea to greet the tourists.

     ”I can tell you many stories of people who discovered that the guy who was coming to collect the trash would instead throw it in the river behind,” said Paola Cannucciari, program co-ordinator for waste collection and recycling company ecoBali.

More than 100 environment ministers from around the world will be visiting Bali in December for a conference to work out ways to slow climate change. Visitors will be able to see the trash problem if they walk around the main tourist areas of Kuta or Seminyak, away from the luxury enclave of Nusa Dua where the talks will be held. And December is the start of the rainy season, when drains overflow more easily.

    Bali, in a way, has been a victim of its own success. Many Balinese have not fully adapted to the modern Western lifestyle that has supplanted a largely agrarian way of life in just a few decades, particularly in the island’s densely populated south.

     ”If you think in Bali 30 years ago, basically it was just a bunch of surfers would come and then the majority of things the Balinese would use would be all organic,” Cannucciari said.

    Now the waste is made of plastic, bleached paper or Styrofoam.

     ”People are just not educated,” she said, adding the island needed enforceable policies on waste management plus education and information programmes.

     Bali’s unsightly rubbish problem was likely to get worse before things improved, said Christian Fritz, project advisor for Bali International Consulting Group, which advises companies on alternative technologies and sustainable development.

   More than one million foreign tourists have visited Bali so far this year eager to see the famed beaches, walk among the rice paddies or visit temples and watch Balinese dances.

    The economy is booming once more, recovering after bomb blasts in 2002 and 2005 and prompting a building boom for luxury villas, five-star hotels, malls and spas.

     ”It’s an overproduction of waste that goes straight into the ocean,” said Fritz. 

     ”In the time period from seven years to now, the problem is getting bigger. Even if more people are addressing the problem, the problem has proportionately grown through strong development because over the last couple of years you have more individual villas. Those produce additional waste.”

     A major problem was a lack of government-controlled collection and waste disposal sites.

    ”The problem is there are a lot of areas not run by the government. The informal sector is big. There are a lot of illegal dumping sites. People just throw everything there. Most probably it’s connected to a little river or canal. Definitely not what you want to see,” Cannucciari said.

    “The problem of waste management in Bali is huge,” she added. 

     But people were talking about it and awareness was growing, aided by a number of organisations teaching environmental education, ecoBali among them. A number of five-star hotels were also actively involved in recycling their waste.

    But a lot more needs to be done, particularly cleaning up the rivers and streams.

     Surfers also complain about polluted sea water. An American surfer named Dan said the pollution was particularly noticeable after a big storm.

     Dan, who lives in Bali, said he didn’t suffer rashes but had had a string of nasal infections and was told by long-time surfers that after a year his body would develop resistance to the pollution.

      ”A clear example of the problem here, is that you might have a clean beach because it’s in the interests of the hotel industry to keep it clean,” said Fritz.

     “But on the other side you have a river that’s highly polluted
because no tourists go there. That’s a contradiction in itself. It’s the same environment you are living in.”

     As if to underscore the point, just next to the upscale beach-side restaurant where Reuters interviewed Fritz and Cannucciari is a fetid, rubbish-filled stream that empties straight into the ocean.