Visiting Surabaya’s Landfill Site With The Incredible Size of Site & Amount of Rubbish

by James Ogilvie – England

My first day in Surabaya was a very interesting one. In the morning we went to a local elementary school, SDK Kristus Raja Surabaya, where I was introduced to several classes of children and spoke to them briefly about myself, England and the environmental issues that children in England are learning about.

During my eight weeks here we will be working with several schools to run environmental projects for the children. It was great to meet some of the children and speak to them, and they were all very friendly and excited to meet me!

After lunch we drove out to the landfill site of Surabaya, where all the city’s rubbish is dumped. The size of the site and the amount of rubbish was incredible, with rubbish piled up to 10m deep over an area of 37 hectares. The smell was really bad and it was amazing to see the amount of people who work on the landfill site collecting plastic. I think when the children go and see where all their rubbish goes it might have an effect on them to be more careful about throwing away rubbish!

Overall, I had an enjoyable first day working with Tunas Hijau and I am looking forward to continuing their work in the next eight weeks.