Islets in the Thousand Islands

Islets in the Thousand Islands, including Rambut and Untung Jawa, have become home to Jakarta’s waste, with piles of garbage scattered along their beaches.

Plastic, styrofoam and even mattresses and sandals mask the white sand along Pulau Rambut beach, including the wetlands, smothering the area’s mangrove forests.

Suparyanto, an officer at the Jakarta Natural Resources Conservation Bureau, said most of the waste is carried to the island from Jakarta via the capital’s 13 rivers.

“The garbage can damage the coral reefs and mangrove roots, but we can not clean up all the garbage by ourselves.”

“We need assistance from other agencies, like the Jakarta Maritime, Agriculture and Food Resilience Agency and the Sanitation Agency. If the city’s rivers were clean, the sea would also be clean,” Suparyanto said.

Sadun, who cleans up waste along the seashore of the Untung Jawa Island, said it is hard to keep the area clean.

“I collect about a ton of garbage everyday before I take it to a dump in the other part of Untung Jawa Island,” the officer at the Thousand Islands sanitation subagency said.

“At the dump site, we later separate the organic and inorganic waste.

“Residents in the island area are aware of the importance of keeping their environment clean because the island is a tourism asset and an important source of income for them,” Sadun said.

Rambut Island is famous for its mangrove forests, while the 18-hectare Bokor Island is mainly a secondary forest reservation.

The 90-hectare Rambut Island has been declared and protected as a conservation area since the Dutch colonial era.

A ministerial decree issued by the Forestry and Agriculture Ministry in 1999, declared Rambut Island a wildlife reserve.

After learning of the poor condition of the islands, an environmental NGO, the Window of Conservational Work (Jejak), recently pitched in to help clean up waste in Rambut, Untung Jawa and Onrust Islands.

Head of the organizations Bogor branch, Anisa Fitri, said Rambut Island had a big role in ecological aspect, especially for preserving birds.

The islands are home to 30 species of seabirds.

“We also collaborated with about 60 students of the Bogor Institute of Agriculture (IPB), who took part in the event. We aim to raise their awareness to care about the environment,” said Fitri.

Besides cleaning up the garbage, the students also planted mangrove trees on Rambut Island. One student, Halim Perdana Kusuma, said that this kind of activity encouraged him to love the sea and mangrove forest.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 24th, 2009 at 4:40 pm and is filed under Island, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.