Benowo residents advised not to drink `polluted' well water

Residents living near the Benowo dump site in Surabaya have been warned against consuming ground water from their wells, which the local environment agency said have been polluted by waste from the landfill.

"We have conducted several research projects on the residents' wells and found that their wells contained poisonous substances, which could endanger their health," East Java environment agency head Dewi Putriani said recently.

Speaking in Surabaya, East Java, she said water from the wells around the landfill site could not be consumed, as it could potentially cause brain cancer.

Dewi said the pollution was produced by alkali-tainted water from the garbage infiltrating the soil and then streaming into the river when it rained. "As well as polluting wells and rivers, the alkali can be absorbed by plant roots. It will be dangerous if alkali is absorbed by - for example - spinach, which is then consumed by people," she said.

"It will endanger their health, just as if they consume water from wells around the landfill," she added.

The pollution was actually detected in 2004, when fish in ponds around the landfill site were found dead. People around Benowo had previously protested against the moving of the garbage dump from Keputih to Benowo, but their demands went unheeded. Dewi said the condition of the Benowo landfill was getting worse as it had to hold all the garbage produced by some 3.7 million households in Surabaya.

The existence of the Benowo landfill is vital for city residents after the Keputih dump site in Surabaya was closed in 2001. Since then, all household garbage has been dumped at the Benowo landfill. The city's households produce 2,500 tons of garbage per day; however, Benowo can only accommodate 1,400 tons per day.

Dewi said this inability to manage the waste properly had caused residents' wells to become polluted by dangerous materials or liquids.

The Surabaya municipal administration has built waste processing installations and introduced several programs to alleviate the problem, including encouraging residents in the city to separate wet and dry garbage. However, the programs are not yet effective enough to overcome the city's waste disposal problem, as the volume of garbage continues to increase in line with the increasing number of local residents.

Surabaya waste and sanitation management head Aditya Wasita said, with its daily capacity of 1,400 tons of garbage, the 37,000-hectare Benowo landfill site was expected to be full within the next four or five years.