Topic Area 2: Water and Environmental Sustainability

Water and Environmental Sustainability: Think Outside The Sink


Provision of an adequate quantity of clean water has been a matter of concern since the beginning of civilisation. Besides drought, as stream has always been the recipient of wastes discharge from human activities, be it domestic sources, industrial or agricultural effluents or mining process water, the massive increase of industrial productions accompanied by high growth of large urban populations has led to severe water pollution problems for over the last two centuries. Such situation was found to be even worse in many of the lesser developed countries and some of the megalopolises with unbridled population growth and uncontrolled industrial development. Indonesia, no exception, has been suffering and hardly struggling to face those related problems for over the last two centuries.

Severe conditions occurred even worse since there were some failures identified occurred at the wastewater treatment plants in resulting standard effluent due to various reasons. Based on the investigations of some rivers in Indonesia by Research Center for Water Resources (Pusat Penelitian dan Pengembangan Sumber Daya Air) as the authorized institution under Ministry of Public Works, in 2004, most rivers in Java Island were identified over reaching the water quality standard. Moreover, about 70% of the streams/rivers in Indonesia were recently reported on the national daily to be highly polluted due to either industrial or domestic wastewater. While during rainy season, due to significant land use change, inappropriate drainage system, and weak solid waste management, flooding is still a crucial issue at all cities in Indonesia including Bandung City.

A proactive action is therefore needed to communicate the above water problems to stakeholders; in this case students and locals are preferred. Hence a workshop entitled “Think outside the sink” is designed to discuss, evaluate, and criticize the water and environmental issues occurred in Bandung City and learn from the practise in coal mining of PT. Pamapersada Nusantara as example.