Bali officials are concerned that if the island’s trash and traffic problems don’t improve, they will have a negative impact on the future of tourism.
The issue of waste management in Bali has long been a hot topic with recent photos and videos showing villages overrun with mounds of plastic bottles, food containers and abandoned shopping bags.
Made Mendra Astawa, the head of the Bali Tourism Village Communication Forum, wants communities and tourism leaders across Bali to step up and take a more of an active role in tackling both waste management and traffic congestion.
He fears it will affect the island’s public image, economy and tourist experience if it’s not addressed describing the issue as “urgent”.
“If tourists to Bali decrease, visits to tourist villages are also at risk of decreasing,” he told reporters this week, according to The Bali Sun.
While the island’s coastal resorts are always in demand, more tourists are keen to explore local villages.
Local and national governments are also pushing for this by promoting art, culture and spirituality to tourists visiting Bali through the development of tourism villages.
Bali’s most famous tourist village, Penglipuran Village, is currently welcoming over 3,000 visitors a day, The Bali Sun reports.
However, if traffic congestion continues to get worse, tourists won’t be inclined to leave their resorts and visit surrounding villages.
“Tourists and us in general certainly don’t like polluted environments and those that make them uncomfortable,” Mr Astawa told the publication.
He claimed tourists are starting to think twice about visiting tourism villages “in case they aren’t as pretty as they appear in photos” and are perhaps struggling with waste management.
Indonesia’s co-ordinating minister for Maritime Affairs and Investment, Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan, suggested the recently introduced tourism tax be spent on the waste problem.
He explained that if it continues without “significant and rapid improvement” the problem will become “uncontrollable”.
“I think it [tourism tax] is good for Bali; why not use it to look after its waste,” he told reporters last month.
“Garbage must be cleaned; now there is a smell. I spoke to the mayor of Denpasar to fix it but don’t use it as a political issue, it’s not good just fix it and reduce the smell.”
Gary Bencheghib, a French filmmaker living in Indonesia, shared a now viral Instagram video of an “open dump” 50m high covered in trash.
He said it is one of many open dumps around Bali.
“I’ve just made it here, right at the foot of this giant open landfill. It’s so high we can’t even see the top and it falls right into the river,” he said.
Gary is the founder of environmental NGO Sungai Watch, designed to “protects waterways in Indonesia”.
Since establishing the not-for-profit organisation in October 2020, Sungai Watch, comprised of a team of 83 full-time members, have collected a total of 868,582kg of waste, according to its 2022 Impact Report.
However, while there are volunteer groups such as Gary’s in place doing their part to protect the island, government support and funding is still needed.
“We audited 235,218 individual waste items in 2022. Our objective with this data is to identify the sources if plastic pollution and drive meaningful conversations to ignite long-term impact with the government and the companies most responsible for the plastic pollution in Indonesia.”
Meanwhile, local leaders are working to establish new ways of managing traffic and the roads in busy tourist areas to help ease congestion.
Putu Winastra, on behalf of the Bali Leadership Council of Indonesian Travel Agencies, noted tourist hotspots Kuta, Seminyak and Canggu were garnering complaints from locals and tourists.
Winastra told The Bali Sun he is calling for more traffic officers to be stationed at busy intersections in Bali’s most popular areas.
He is also calling for officers to handle people who are obstructing the flow of traffic.
“For example, selling on the side of the road, then there are people shopping and parking their vehicles, automatically triggering chaos and leading to traffic [jams]” he said.