Bandung City Hotel, Restaurant and Tourism Association Commits to Managing Waste from Upstream

Regional Secretary, Ema Sumarna, admitted that he had socialized waste management in each cluster. Starting from education clusters, shopping centers, places of worship, city community groups, and now hotels, cafes, restaurants and tourism.

"We continue to try to build understanding and commitment to dealing with waste. We hope that the waste can be finished upstream. I am sure that those in the cafe, restaurant, tourist attractions and hotel clusters can also be committed," said Ema at Bandung City Hall, Monday 30 October 2023 .

He said, from 135 TPS, now there are 108 TPS that can be handled and are starting to approach normal.

"If hotels in Bandung City can handle 100 percent of waste, there is no need to pay waste levies. We just have to commit to finishing the waste at our respective places," he said.

He said that one of the inspirational steps could be emulated from the PVJ mall. Every day PVJ produces 5 tons of waste, 90 percent of which is organic waste.

"And that was finished with maggots. They were willing to make sacrifices in handling the waste problem, prepared land to handle waste with maggots. Then inorganic waste collaborated with collectors. The remaining 2 percent of residual waste was thrown into the landfill," he explained.

Ema appealed not to let rubbish kill the tourism potential of Bandung City. Moreover, the city of Bandung is very dependent on the tourism services sector.

"It's free, the method can be adapted to each individual. Please choose a method that is suitable for the environment. Don't let all the rubbish pile up at your place. That will make people less interested in visiting," he appealed.

Meanwhile, Director of Business Development and Marketing at Saung Angklung Udjo, Satria Yanuar Akbar, said that Saung Angklung Udjo has managed 7 tons of waste independently.

"We even opened a waste processing tour for children. This is a new education that we are developing," said Satria.

Apart from that, his party will also collaborate with Octopus next month to process inorganic waste in Cibeunying Kidul. The system is similar to the Waste Bank.

"Especially now that foreign tourists have started to return, on average a week there are 200 foreign tourists coming to our place. We admit that the waste problem is enough to become homework in Cibeunying Kidul. Therefore, we are working on it, hopefully next week we will "officially, Cibeunying Kidul becomes KBS," he said.

Apart from that, Membership Division of the Indonesian Hotel and Restaurant Association (PHRI) West Java, Iwan Siwadimadja said, since 3 months ago PHRI has been conducting waste education in hotels and restaurants in the city of Bandung.

"A total of 294 of our members have received counseling. While the counseling was underway, the Sarimukti fire occurred. We also immediately accelerated waste processing in hotels and restaurants," admitted Iwan.

He revealed that around the beginning of September, the sorted organic waste had started to be transported by the Waste Management UPT. Then distributed to maggot processors.

"It's just that the process is a bit difficult to coordinate. We have also done a comparative study with Taman Safari to see how to process it. Hopefully within a month the process will be ready," he said.

He mentioned that several hotels that had 100 percent disposed of waste on site were El Royal, Grand Cokro, and Hotel Malaka. (din)**

Head of the Bandung City Communication and Information Office

Yayan A. Brilyana