Pollution From Time to Time

Driven by the love for his wife, J.W.B. Money, an Englishman, sailed from Calcutta, India, to the island of Java in the summer of 1858 to look for a cure for his wife's illness. Before traveling across Java, he made a brief stopover in Batavia, and found that the situation there was surprisingly much different from what he had read in books, that mostly pictured Batavia as a dirty city.

"Batavia itself is one of the cleanest and most beautiful cities there is," Money wrote in his notes published in Jawa Tempo Doeloe. This was strikingly different from many contemporaries who reviewed Batavia. Charles Walter Kinloch, for example, wrote that Batavia was a diseased city due to air pollution.

"Ships must anchor a considerable distance from the coast to avoid the diseases brought by bad land winds, the landing process is always a difficult thing," Kinloch wrote in 1852.  

Batavia was notorious as an unhealthy city since the mid-18th century. The air was foul and the water was extremely dirty, easily spreading many diseases. The number of Dutch deaths increased, giving a new name for Batavia: "Graveyard for the Dutch". However, in contrary, this city was once named "Queen of the East" during the 17th century.

Behind that name, who would have thought that Batavia had suffered from pollution problems?  

Founded in 1619 by Jan Pieterszoon Coen as the headquarters of the Dutch East Indies Trading Company (VOC) in Asia, Batavia quickly developed into an international trade center. In just ten years the city was inhabited by 20,000 people of all nationalities. And just as quickly, pollution emerged,  some of which was caused by the garbage from international trade activities.

"By 1630, piles of rubbish in Batavia's streets and canals had become a problem. This rubbish consisted mainly of ashes, bricks, lime, palm leaves and other materials. This was in addition to fish carcasses from several markets," wrote Luc Nagtegaal in "Urban Pollution in Java, 1600-1850", published in Issues in Urban Development. Unpleasant odors also spread in several corners of the city.  

The Batavia High Government eventually responded and implemented penalties for people who threw garbage into the streets or canals. They also established garbage collectors who used barges to travel along the canals to pick up garbage. At certain points, they stopped and got off the barges to pick up trash on the street.

To support the officers' work, the High Government provided garbage bins in many places in 1673. "But this did not solve the problem of filth in the city," Luc wrote. The High Government then looked for other ways, and one of them was to contract a Chinese contractor to clear the streets and canals of garbage in 1707.

However, this decision only added to the problem, as some of the workers acted mischievously. Instead of taking the garbage to a dumping site located far outside the city, they often dumped it into the sea to shorten their work. The seafront became polluted as a result, but this water pollution problem was apparently not new.

The Nine O'Clock Flowers

Water pollution has plagued Batavia since the mid-17th century. "The main form of water pollution is feces," Luc wrote. Batavia didn't have a good fecal sanitation system at that time. The residents used to use jars to collect feces, and then throw the jars into canals and rivers whenever they wanted.

This practice was very damaging especially when the canals and rivers in Batavia were congested. The foul odor of excrement wafted up, and it could last for several days in the dry season.

Realizing that the practice endangered water and air quality, the High Government issued a regulation in 1653 prohibiting residents from disposing of jars before nine in the evening. The practice stopped by the end of the 18th century.

Residents were no longer allowed to dispose of excrement jars into the canal. Instead, the High Government assigned a few people to pick up the jars so that they wouldn't keep polluting the water. The problem of water pollution was also known to be the reason for the increase in the number of Dutch deaths in the mid-18th century.

"One historian who argued about this was Leonard Blusse in his book, Strange Alliances. He argued that water pollution was the main factor in spreading diseases during epidemics, which then caused many Dutch people to die," said Bondan Kanumoyoso, a Batavia historian.

John Barrow, secretary of the British Navy Department, noted that the practice of dumping jars was modified in 1792. "At the end of the day, let's say nine o'clock in the evening, the time when all the parties were over and everyone returned to their homes, Chinese sampans or feces boats began to sail the city canals," John Barrow wrote in Jawa Tempo Doeloe.

He considered the practice very disgusting and inappropriate. However, the residents of Batavia were adamant. If there was no foul smell, they would say: "The nine o'clock flowers have just bloomed." Other times, if the air was suddenly unhealthy, they complained. This air pollution was no less miserable for the people of Batavia than water pollution.

Air pollution came from sugar factories, gunpowder factories, brick factories, tanneries, sawmills, wine distilleries, and lime factories. Sugar factories stood along the river that bisected Batavia.  

"Paintings dated 1696 show that there were 16 sugar factories located along the Ciliwung River, 36 factories along the Sunter river, and 26 factories on the banks of the Pesanggrahan River," wrote Bondan Kanumoyoso in "Beyond the City Wall: Society and Economic Development in the Ommelanden of Batavia, 1684-1740", a dissertation at Leiden University, Netherlands. The number increased in 1710, when the industry reached its heyday.  

Meanwhile, gunpowder and other factories were already established in 1657 around Molenvliet, a suburb of Batavia. According to Luc, of all these, the gunpowder factories contributed the most dangerous pollutants. "The smoke produced is extremely toxic," Luc wrote. The residents in the city could no longer stand it. Most of them chose to move to healthier areas outside the city such as Weltevreden.

The Pollution in Other Cities

Several cities in Java also faced similar problems. Although not as serious as in Batavia, water pollution was found in Surabaya, Semarang, and Surakarta during the 17th-18th centuries. However, this situation changed, especially in Surabaya, in the first half of the 19th century.  

As Surabaya became one of the destinations for agricultural expansion, the population increased and water pollution began to become a serious problem.  

Hageman, a Dutch citizen living in Surabaya, reported that around 6400 people dumped feces and garbage into Krambangan River, a tributary of the Brantas River that cuts through several cities in East Java. In fact, residents also use this same river for bathing.

"Because the river was usually only used for bathing, most of the water is still clear. But then the situation changed. Most of the water became muddy and dangerous, especially at high tide," Hageman wrote in Tijdschrift voor Nederlansch Indie, as quoted by Luc Nagtegaal.

According to Luc, the accounts of 19th century travelers corroborate Hageman's report. "From afar there was already a bad smell from the river in the center of Surabaya. They smelled it when they crossed a bridge at Simpang, which is several miles away from the city center," Luc wrote.  

The flow of the river wasn't smooth because it was choked with garbage, causing diseases to emerge. Of all the cities in East Java, Surabaya suffered the most from cholera outbreaks. As a result, water pollution in Surabaya became as severe as in Batavia. Similar to Batavia, the city center began to be abandoned as Europeans flocked to healthier lands.  

In Semarang, the water situation was much better, although not without pollution. The reasons were because Semarang was less swampy than Batavia and Surabaya, and the river gradient in Semarang was much greater. Some canals that were dug in the first half of the 18th century were only flooded at the beginning of the 19th century.  

The situation in Surakarta was similar. The water was still clean and there was much less pollution. However, residents couldn't consume the water immediately, and still had to cook it to make sure the absence of bacteria, which mostly came from waste water discharges from the sugarcane factories.

Semarang, Surabaya, and Surakarta were all linked in air pollution. Several sugar factories, gunpowder factories, tanneries, and wine distilleries were established in these three cities. Even when gunpowder factories were banned in Batavia in the early 19th century, Surabaya and Semarang still had them until the mid-19th century. As in Batavia, these factories became the biggest sources of air pollution in the three cities. Black smoke and thick residues of harmful chemicals often came out of the factory chimney, inevitably polluting the city air.

Modern Industrial Pollution

Although factories had been established during the colonial period, Java couldn't yet be considered a major industrial region. An industrialization commission was even only established in 1915, and the goal wasn't to accelerate industrialization in Java, but to prevent shortages of basic commodities during the First World War. Java's economy was still agrarian, but soon the New Order changed it drastically.  

"Thereafter, the Japanese occupation, the revolution, and the political disturbances of the 1950s and 1960s, together with a chronic shortage of investment capital, all worked to keep industrial development at a very low level," wrote Robert Cribb in "The Politics of Pollution Control in Indonesia", published in Asian Survey in 1990. "With Suharto's New Order in 1965-66 came major change”.  

Indonesia was wide open to foreign investment. Large industrial plants sprung up, causing pollution problems to escalate. "Most pressing is the pollution of river banks by industries," Cribb wrote. The pollution affected people who lived by the river because they used river water for their daily needs.  

In Surabaya, industrial factories established in the 1970s absorbed a lot of labor, which caused a dilemma, because their presence also contributed to the pollution of Surabaya's rivers. "The Surabaya River, the primary source of drinking water in the region, was used as a dumping ground for rubbish," wrote Anton Lucas and Arief W. Djati in "The Politics of Environmental and Water Pollution in East Java", published in Peter Boomgaard's A World of Water.  

Coupled with industrial factory waste, the river's water quality had declined. "These incidents inspired the provincial government to issue regulations protecting rivers from water pollution," Lucas and Djati wrote. One of the main points of the regulation states that factories must have their own sewage treatment plants.  

A similar situation happened in Semarang. The water of Kali Tapak, for example, was no longer clear. The fish ponds and rice fields of local residents were also polluted by factory waste. Many fish died in the river after a number of industrial factories were established there since the 1970s.  

Surprisingly, this case only surfaced in 1991. "This was after residents had suffered for 14 years from the pollution of one of the factories there, PT Semarang Diamond Chemicals," wrote Anton Lucas in "The River Pollution and Political Action in Indonesia", published in The Politics of Environment in Southeast Asia by Philip Hirsch and Carol Warren.  

During that time, residents and non-governmental organizations persistently organized a number of efforts to tackle pollution, such as boycotting factory products, asking factories to build waste reservoirs, and trying to drag polluters to court. The struggle was anything but easy. The coalition of businessmen and rulers often hindered their efforts. The motive was as clear as day: business.

These coalitions still last until now, and so long as that is the case, pollution will still haunt Indonesia.