U.S. trash is treasure in Indonesian village

BANGUN, Indonesia – Few Americans have heard of this village, wedged between peanut farms and a paper mill on the island of Java. But the people here have gained an intimate familiarity with the United States – by rooting around in its trash.

They have combed through ripped sleeves of Oreos, empty packages of

Trader Joe’s meatballs, discarded “Lord of the Rings” DVDS and dented plastic shampoo bottles. They have even discovered the occasional $20 bill.

“It’s amazing sometimes,” marveled 43-year-old Eko Wahyudi, “what American people throw away.”

He is one of the many scrap dealers in Bangun, a village of 1,500 families at the receiving end of a transoceanic waste trade worth more than $1.5 billion a year.

The U.S. and other wealthy nations have long sent cargo ships of scrap to Asia, where it is sorted and recycled to fuel industries hungry for raw materials. Indonesia imports large amounts of used paper to turn into cardboard.

A dirty secret of the waste trade, however, is that the paper shipments often include other garbage – such as municipal trash – that can’t be used in manufacturing.

But even that has value in Indonesia. Paper mills sell the trash to nearby villages, where cottage industries have popped up to pick through it and extract any remaining value.

In Bangun, where most of the 1,500 families work in waste, recyclers are after aluminum cans, metal wire and hard plastic that can be cleaned and fed back into industrial use.