Saving the world at the flick of a power switch

The Jakarta Post, Friday, February 24, 2006

“My mother always reminds me to turn off unnecessary lighting. I always thought that was her nagging, now I know it’s more than that,” said 15-year-old Hapsari Sulistyaningrum.

Hapsari and her friends from State High School No. 61 in East Jakarta were educated about the importance of saving energy during a Power Switch campaign conducted by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) Indonesia and Gadis magazine.

Turn off lights and air conditioners when leaving a room, turn off computer monitors during break time, save paper by using both sides and do not put electronic appliances on standby — turn them off.

There is nothing revolutionary in such advice. The campaign focuses more on how these simple acts contribute to a greater good that is to slow down global warming.

“Fossil fuel-based electricity generation is responsible for up to 37 percent of the carbon dioxide spewed into the air globally,” policy advocacy campaigner for WWF Indonesia’s climate and energy program Muhamad Suhud said, explaining that this in turn contributes to greenhouse gas emissions, which cause climate change.

Each time people watch television, turn on an air conditioner or a light, use a hair dryer, play a video game, or use a microwave or a washing machine, they are contributing to global warming.

On the other hand, the rate of deforestation has created a situation in which the remaining forests are overloaded in converting carbon dioxide to oxygen.

“There’s just not enough forested land to keep pace with the amount of carbon dioxide that goes into the atmosphere,” Suhud said.

As a result, average global temperatures rose by about 0.7 degrees Celsius between 1990 and 2006, he said, adding that climate experts believe current temperatures will rise by about 5.8 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.

What happens when temperatures rise? Glaciers will melt at a faster pace; experts believe that, by 2080, the water surface will rise by between nine to 69 centimeters, endangering the population of people on island nations, including Indonesia.

Furthermore, experts believe that an increase above two degrees Celsius will cause the extinction of many species especially in the Arctic and tropical areas.

Closer to home, Suhud said the high concentration of demand in big cities had forced state power company PLN to focus production on these areas. Only 53 percent of households nationwide have access to electricity, some 60 percent of which are on Java, mostly in Jakarta.

“Meanwhile, demand for electricity continues to increase, and PLN has no means to keep up. As a result, the public experiences blackouts more frequently,” he said.

If people on Java in particular used electricity efficiently then PLN could concentrate on other areas of the country, he added.

“It’s really difficult to manage without electricity, no computers on which to do homework, no radio or television with which to listen to the news,” Hapsari said.

“I’ll be certain now to turn off lights when I don’t need them, it’s the least I can do to save energy.”

The Power Switch campaign will also go to State High School No. 34 in Pondok Labu, South Jakarta, and private BPK Penabur No. 5 high school in Kelapa Gading, North Jakarta.

Jakarta, Bandung pilot programs will ‘aid the blind’

The Jakarta Post, Monday, February 20, 2006

There are no arguments for the cause of the blind stronger than those presented by the blind themselves. But for the visually impaired to be able to fight for their rights, education comes first and foremost.

Unfortunately, the main stumbling block facing the blind, or people with any other disability, is the attitude of society, which tends to dismiss their capabilities, including in the field of education.

“There’s a lot of negative images that surround blindness, which manifest themselves in either overt or sometimes subtle attitudes of what blind people can and cannot do,” the president of the International Council for the Education of People with Visual Impairment (ICEVI), Lawrence F. Campbell, said Friday.

The biggest obstacle preventing blind people from entering university, for example, usually comes from entrance committees that cannot imagine the difficulties a blind person must face to get through university life.

“So we are concerned that in the developing world today, nine out of 10 children with visual impairments are locked out of the education system,” Campbell told The Jakarta Post.

He said that while over the years there had been increasing concern for providing children with visual impairments basic education, less attention had been given to those who aim at higher education.

“Admittedly, there are only a small percentage of people that reach the point where they can actually qualify to enter higher education, but when they reach that point it’s not easy at all,” Campbell said.

Underlining this point, a member of local non-governmental organization Mitra Netra Foundation, Tolhas Damanik, said blind and visually impaired people in Indonesia were encouraged to continue to vocational school after junior high school, instead of pursuing a university degree.

“The challenges that they face, the lack of support systems in place at universities, can be very discouraging and only the most determined really persist,” Campbell said.

To make increase access to higher education for the visually impaired, the ICEVI, together with the Overbrook-Nippon Network on Educational Technology (ON-NET), is working with the Mitra Netra Foundation, the Indonesian Union for the Blind and the Indonesian University for Education (UPI) in Bandung, on a pilot project in Jakarta and Bandung.

“This pilot project can demonstrate that with a modest investment these barriers can be overcome, and life at university can be made easier and less stressful for blind students,” said Campbell, who is also ON-NET’s project director.

The project, expected to be set up at Bandung’s UPI and at Mitra Netra’s office in Lebak Bulus, South Jakarta, will provide visually impaired university students with assistance such as screen reader-equipped computers, educational materials in Braille and recorded form, as well as orientation and counseling support.

The US$60,000 project is expected to benefit more than 80 students, including some 50 students in Bandung, most attending UPI, and about 33 students at 14 universities in Greater Jakarta. It is hoped the project will encourage other universities and institutions to set up similar programs.

Children learn about potable water

The Jakarta Post, Sunday, February 19, 2006

Ten-year-old Addo Suryoharto has never seen someone boiling water to drink before. At home he drinks water out of a dispenser and water canisters supplied by popular bottled water companies.

Which was why the fifth grader sat wide-eyed during a demonstration of various water disinfection techniques at his school, Rawa Barat State Elementary School No. 07, in Kebayoran Baru, South Jakarta on Saturday.

“I was very interested in the boiling water technique, nobody at home has ever boiled water for drinking,” Addo told The Jakarta Post.

Organized by the United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Environmental Services Program and USAID-supported program Aman Tirta, the Water Testing Day on Saturday informed students like Addo that clean water — without odor or color — does not mean it is potable.

To make water safe for drinking, it needs to be put through certain processes to make sure disease-bearing bacteria are killed.

Students were divided into four groups, each taught a specific disinfection technique — boiling, solar disinfection, ceramic filtering or chlorination.

Water must be boiled for at least two or three minutes past boiling point to ensure harmful bacteria are killed. It must then be stored in an enclosed container to prevent the water from being recontaminated.

For solar disinfection, clean water is put into a transparent bottle and put under direct sunlight for at least six hours on a clear day.

“It’s better if the bottle is blackened, because the color black absorbs heat better,” a student from the solar disinfection group said.

Filtering water through a ceramic filter impregnated with colloidal silver is another way to get rid of bacteria in water and make it safe to drink, but water put through a new filter should be treated twice before drinking it to get rid of the ash and soil aroma of a new ceramic filter.

Adding a certain amount of chlorine to water is also known to reduce disease-bearing organisms or pathogens that causes diarrhea and other waterborne diseases.

Aman Tirta recently introduced water additive Air Rahmat to help poor people get access to safe and cheap drinking water.

Air Rahmat is a liquid 1.25 percent sodium hypochlorite solution, originally developed as part of the Safe Water Systems program of the U.S.-based Centers for Disease Control.

A 100 milliliter bottle of Air Rahmat — costing Rp 4,000 (about US$0.43) — can treat about 600 liters of water, enough for a family of five to drink for a month.

Some 75 percent of all diseases rampant in third-world countries are caused by contaminated drinking water. In Indonesia, at least 300 out of every 1,000 people suffer from a waterborne disease every year, Ismail Malik from the Health Ministry’s environmental health division said.

He said that even water distributed by regional tap water companies, which is considered better quality than that from wells, may still contain pathogens.

Routine surveys from regional health agencies indicate that at least 20 percent of all water dispensed by tap water companies in the country is contaminated with microbiobiological indicators such as fecal coliform, thermotolerant coliforms and E. coli — which indicates the presence of pathogens in the water.

“Which is why it is important for people to learn early on how to disinfect water properly for drinking,” he said.

Lessons learned from Asia’s three MRT systems

The Jakarta Post, Friday, 17 February 2006

The experiences of three major Asian cities indicate a mass rapid transit (MRT) system will not work effectively unless there is great political will to integrate the system on a level playing field with cars, buses and other rail projects.

“Powerful leadership is needed to plan, think through and execute the plan,” a World Bank transportation expert, Jitendra N. Bajpai, said at a discussion Wednesday, citing Lee Kuan Yew and Nikita Kruschev as the figures behind the success of the Singapore and Moscow metros, respectively.

Bajpai — part of a team studying urban rail concessions in Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur and Manila for the World Bank — said many of the failures in implementing MRT systems in these three cities derived from failed complementary actions, or unrealistic targets.

“Some expected the MRT systems to solve congestion and to improve public transportation across the board, without the complementary policies that are now recognized as necessary. These expectations were unrealistic,” he said.

Transportation policies should provide a level playing field for all transportation modes through tax/subsidy and regulatory measures, otherwise MRT benefits suffer and government funding support is higher than it should be, Bajpai said, explaining that this happens when cars or buses are subsidized or when competition is not regulated.

People also need to access the MRT by other transportation modes, therefore a failure to set up seamless transfers contributed to the fact that the MRT systems in the three cities failed to get car owners to switch to the systems.

“If you had a car, would you leave your car and use the system, knowing that you needed to make so many transfers? You wouldn’t do it, unless the transfers were very well done,” Bajpai said.

So far, the most successful of the systems is Bangkok’s 23-kilometer BTS skytrain, operating since 2000, with a ridership of 15.2 passengers per kilometer in a city of 10 million, 53 percent of whom use public transportation.

Manila’s 11 million population brought in only 15.6 passengers per kilometer on its 24-km LRT III system, in a city where 72 percent of the population uses public transportation.

Other systems — Bangkok’s Blue Line subway (18 km) and Kuala Lumpur’s Star (25 km), Putra (24 km) and Monorail (11 km) — each attracted fewer than 10 passengers per kilometer.

While all of these systems began with private concessions — in the hope of avoiding the need for public funding — most projects did not achieve the financial returns forecast, and were taken over by the government, Bajpai said.

“Because an MRT system is expensive — you can’t just leave off once the project has started, meaning that the government needs to take over,” he said, citing the Star and Putra lines in Kuala Lumpur.

Learning from the experiences of the three cities, Jakarta should try to address its transportation problems in a way that it can most afford, and not rely solely on private concessions because a strong government role is still needed to make the system feasible, Bajpai said.

“What happens is that people are attracted to a certain system without looking at how it can solve the problem. The solution is brought forward first, without looking at the problem,” he said.

In every step of planning and execution, public consultation and transparency should be emphasized, and the government’s focus needs to be on creating a sustainable MRT system, rather than on implementing an infrastructure project.

For Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur and Manila, “it’s a tale of winners and losers, and in the end the winners are the users — but not the poor people because fares are high — and the losers are the government, bankers and investors”, Bajpai said.

‘Fruity’ oil forgotten alternative to diesel fuel

The Jakarta Post, Wednesday, February 15, 2006

The Japanese encouraged farmers in Indonesia — at the time a Japanese colony — to grow Jatropha curcas linnaeus, locally known as jarak pagar, as an alternative fuel for its tanks and warplanes during World War II.

Not too long ago, the fruits of this plant — its leaves traditionally used to cure stomach aches in babies — was also used as a substitute for kerosene.

However, cheap and easy access to fossil fuels led to this useful plant being passed over or relegated to backyard gardens as shrubbery.

“Fossil fuels have given us a false sense of security for too long, we never considered any other fuel, because it was cheap and easily available,” Nadirman Haska, head of biotechnological research at the Agency for Assessment and Application of Technology (BPPT), said Tuesday.

It’s a different story today. As oil reserves dwindle and prices increase, Indonesia has taken the first serious step towards commercializing biofuel with Presidential Instruction No. 1/2006 for the provision and utilization of biofuel as a fuel alternative, issued in January.

And people are finally turning their attention back to the jarak pagar as a possible fuel alternative.

The oil produced by the fruits of the jarak pagar can be used to substitute diesel fuel, or biodiesel, Nadirman said during a media trip organized by NGO Mitra Emisi Bersih (clean emission partner) to BPPT’s biotechnology workshop in Serpong.

“Jarak pagar has the advantage of being able to grow in extremely dry conditions. Even in regions with only four months of rainfall, it can prosper,” he said, comparing it to palm oil, which can only grow in specific conditions.

From the time of planting, it takes only six months until the jarak plant bears fruit, but maximum productivity is only achieved when the plant is more than six years old.

“Then it can be harvested for three or four months a year until the plant reaches the age of 20 years,” Nadirman said.

Some 2,500 jarak plants can be planted on a hectare of land, which will yield approximately 10 tons of fruits a year in favorable conditions such as in West Java, he said, explaining that each 12.5 tons of fruit can yield about 1,900 liters of oil.

“To substitute 20 percent of diesel fuel we need about 3.5 million hectares of jarak plantation,” Nadirman said.

Unfortunately, the utilization of the jarak plant is still in its early stages with the BPPT still trying to encourage farmers to plant jarak pagar and to attract the attention of the private sector.

Biodiesel contains no petroleum, but besides being used in its pure form it can be blended at any level with petroleum diesel to create a biodiesel blend.

It can be used directly in compression ignition (diesel) engines with very little or no engine modification because biodiesel has properties similar to petroleum diesel fuels.

One of the most readily available biodiesel sources, and one that has been researched extensively at BPPT, is from palm oil.

The head of the BPPT’s engineering center, Soni Solistia Wirawan, said his office had researched the effects of a blend of up to 30 percent volume biodiesel and 70 percent petroleum diesel.

The research found substantial reduction of unburned hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide and particulate matters — substances that cause air pollution.

“We have found that the use of palm oil biodiesel increases the cetane number meaning that ignition quality is improved,” Soni explained.