Clean-up act: The stylish solution to Bali’s waste troubles
How do you tidy up a prolifically polluted paradise? Hospitality group Potato Head has found the answer.
When Amanda Marcella joined Indonesian hospitality group Potato Head to help with expansion at its Bali hotel and beach club, she didn’t expect to become obsessed with cigarette butts, used napkins and old bed linen. All now occupy her thoughts: she is the hotel’s director of sustainability. Her purview extends far beyond straws and plastic bottles at the Potato Head’s home in Seminyak. “Here we’re doing something for the planet,” says Marcella, as she takes Monocle to see Potato Head’s NGO, The Community Waste Project, which opened in October next to Bali’s biggest refuse dump.
Bali’s beauty is renowned but it has a rubbish problem. The government estimates that some 52 per cent of the island’s waste is mismanaged, with plastic washing up on beaches and littering streets. The rest ends up in landfill, where the refuse forms huge malodorous piles. Dry weather, plus methane produced by the waste, can trigger fires that cover the island in foul smoke.
In 2016, Ronald Akili, Potato Head’s CEO and co-founder, decided that his company needed to do something. Since then it has reduced the amount of its rubbish that ends up in landfill from 60 per cent to 2.6 per cent. Styrofoam is melted with acid and mixed with powdered oyster shells to make material for containers such as soap dispensers. Used cooking oil becomes candles. And plastic is melted into panels that then become furniture. The Community Waste Project is the next step. Here, pre-sorted rubbish bags are audited, heaps of covered compost take up one corner while melting machines turn buckets of shredded plastic into pallets. Anything that can’t be processed on site is handed over to trusted third parties.
But this is just the start: the facility has a daily capacity of 10 tonnes but Bali produces 1.6 million tonnes of waste a year, with about 15 per cent coming from the hospitality industry. The aim is to make the project replicable. The new waste centre was founded in collaboration with two other companies, with five more paying a monthly waste-disposal fee. All benefit from Potato Head’s expertise, says Isabella Rowell, CEO of The Mexicola Group and a co-founder of the project. Without detailed knowledge of how waste disposal actually works, even well-intentioned measures can go awry. Rowell recalls how her restaurants and bars ditched plastic straws for recyclable ones some years ago only to later discover that the new straws needed a special machine to be recycled and there was no such machine in Bali.
The new project means that their efforts help more than just their image. “Sustainability is a huge marketing tool but realistically, if things continue as is, we won’t have a business any more,” says Rowell, who is clear-eyed about the industry’s urgent need to clean up its act. Bali’s allure will eventually fade if it ends up buried in plastic wrappers and used condoms, so the local government is talking about restricting new hospitality developments in tourism hotspots.
The long-term plan for The Community Waste Project is to turn a profit from charging user fees and selling recycled products. This revenue should cover expenses and further expansion. New partners are being actively sought out and there are even hopes to move into processing domestic waste. Almost no one recycles in Bali but given the opportunity, this could change. Staff at Potato Head are already bringing in some of their household waste and this environmentally minded community has a record of driving meaningful change.
seminyak.potatohead.co
