Cool Carbon:

Indonesia: Biogas from Waste

Photo: Shirine Bakhat-Pont/Mercy Corps

Jakarta, the sprawling capital of Indonesia, is home to more than nine million people, with anywhere from two to four million people commuting to the city for work each day. Many residents are rural migrants without legal status, struggling to make money in the vast informal economy.

These families often live in makeshift housing that's excluded from basic urban services such as clean water, sanitation and waste management. Only two percent of Jakarta's urban area is connected to the sewage system, while only about half of the estimated 6,000 tons of solid waste produced per day is managed in any way.

In the population-dense slums of Jakarta, poverty and overcrowding — combined with lack of adequate sanitation and waste disposal — leads to unhealthy, unhygienic and environmentally damaging conditions.

At the same time, a lack of accessible, affordable fuel and electricity inhibits income generation and raises expenditures for already-struggling families. Without reliable electricity, they're unable to work at night on such income-generating activities as food preparation, crafts and sewing. Valuable time is also lost for children to study or read.

In addition, high and severely fluctuating cooking fuel prices affect the quantity and quality of food that poor families are able to consume, potentially leading to malnutrition. This also jeopardizes the day-to-day operations of small food carts, one of the major income-generation strategies of Jakarta’s poor.

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Mercy Corps will begin alleviating these problems in an especially-impoverished area called Penjaringan, through the installation of biogas facilities that convert human and other organic waste into energy that can be used for cooking and lighting. In addition, an education program will build awareness with slum communities and local governments around this new technology, and develop the maintenance capacity to make it sustainable.

The biogas program is being piloted in tenement houses for low-income families in high-density urban areas; an environment with enough closeness of community for the residents to work together on waste separation and maintenance. As a result, the energy produced can be channelled to communal kitchens or high-power gas lanterns for much-needed fuel and lighting solutions.

This innovative project will serve as the basis for replication throughout Jakarta, a city with massive energy shortages and equally massive sanitation problems.

The initial budget for the project is $30,300. So far, Cool Carbon supporters have generated $1,462. You can click here to support this project through a donation to our Climate Change Initiative.