Today is Wednesday, 24th April 2024

Background

As happened in many countries, the problems of municipal waste in Indonesia has been critical as the landfill in most big cities has already exceeded its capacity. National waste management information system reported that there will be more than 300 million ton of waste per year putting into the landfill, not counting of more than 1,400 million ton per year of unmanaged waste per day[1]. Although there is initiative of acceleration program through Precidential Regulation no 35/2018 that gives previledges to 12 cities to conduct waste to electricity projects, until recently, neither one project accomplished. There are at least two challenges that halt this program. First, the electricity over supply situation and too high feed in tariff that should be paid by PLN, the electricity state owned enterprise. Secondly, very high tipping fee, which cannot be afforded by most city governments. As a result, the waste problem in these cities become more critical as more than 800 ton per day of waste enter to those landfills for some more years, not counted around three millios per day of unmanaged waste.

There is another problem regarding fossil fuel consumption, where Indonesia has no more buoyed by abundant oil and gas reserve but become oil importer since 2004, as seen on Figure 1. Natural gas as clean fossil energy will also depleted and predicted in 2028, the country will become net gas importer.

To solve the above problems, there is a new simple way of waste to energy processing in its sources, by empowerment of local people, developed by Sekolah Tinggi Teknik STT PLN, Jakarta [7][2] [8]. This method is called TOSS (Tempat Olah Sampah Setempat), adopting the commutative law of algebra, axb = bxa, the huge scale of waste can atually be solved by the simulatanious effort of large number of communities [2]. The key process of TOSS is a biological treatment called Peuyeumisasi , in Sundanesse term as a traditional way to convert a raw Cassava to become a sweet and soft food. This invention is a combination of several processes inclulding probiotic, composting, fermenting, and biochemical, which was invented by Sundadjaja S D, and developed further by Legino [2] (Listrik Kerakyatan..). Since January 2018, TOSS has been implemented at Klungkung District followed by other locations in Bali, Jakarta, Lombok, South Kalimantan, Bandung, Jepara, Tegal, and Jakarta. Compare to other waste to energy model, TOSS offer many benefit include eliminating waste truck traffic because TOSS can solve waste problem locally at its sources of waste or local, no need organic-non organic presorting work.

TOSS also provides business opportunity, particularly for small and medium scale companies , because its simple way of handling and relatively low capital expenditure. It can also add value to the existing Bank of Waste through a new business line of waste briquettes energy. In addition to the economic advantages, it may also provide environmental benefit as TOSS could reduce gas methan emision from landfill, which much more worse than carbon. and could create job opportunities for a million of local people that are lack of job because of Covid 19 impact.