While cleaning Jakarta’s notoriously filthy rivers and canals is difficult, these viral photos encapsulate why cleaning them is only half the battle.
Yesterday, Jakarta’s Environment Agency Sanitation Management Unit (UPK), which employs the capital’s famously hard-working “orange troops” of river and canal cleaners, posted two perfectly timed photos of a man tossing the contents of a bucket of trash into the Krukut Canal in Tanah Abang, Central Jakarta. While Jakarta’s waterways are often treated as a dumping grounds by many of the capital’s citizens, these photos were especially outrageous because they also showed a cleaner scraping the black-watered canal, helplessly looking on at the litterbug.
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“Aren’t humans thinking beings? Let us optimize our cognitive abilities and our souls so our actions don’t create problems for ourselves and for others,” the agency wrote in the caption to the photo, which they shared across their social media platforms.
That incident occurred on Wednesday and by Thursday the photos had gone viral. Local authorities were also quick to identify the litterer and UPK posted a follow up to the original post showing the police and government officials paying the man a visit to make him pay a IDR300K (US$21.50) littering fine as well as making an example of him for residents in the area by publicizing it.
(Curiously, these photos feature the same cleaner pretty much standing in the exact same spot as he had been the previous day.)
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The maximum fine for littering in rivers and canals in Jakarta is IDR500K.
The city’s orange troops won much praise for cleaning up Jakarta’s waterways during the tenure of former Jakarta Governor Basuki “BTP” Tjahaja Purnama, something many say wasn’t done under previous administrations. Despite their best efforts, many of Jakarta’s rivers and canals are still heavily polluted, as these other recent photos from UPK show that some citizens still dump all sorts of trash into the capital’s waterways, from plastic waste to mattresses.
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