Hello everyone!
Apa kabar?
I am having great experience here in Indonesia.
In Indonesia I join 3 research group who install technologies in villages and do field survey according to the installation.
I would like to share 3 projects that I attend.
Today I will tell you about water treatment project with ITB.
Basically I belong to Water treatment research group in Bandung Institute of Technology.
They have one project that is called as Jokaso(浄化槽）project.
They install waste water treatment system (Bioreactor and septic tank) in tangglan village that locate in Bandung city.
Beside Tangglan village, there is cikapundung river.
conventionally villagers throw their domestic waste water up into the river directly without any treatment.Of course river has been heavily polluted.
And some people still use river as their water resource.
To cope with this problem the wastewater research group installed wastewater treatment system.
[Wastewater treatment project in Tangglan village in Bandung]
In the beginning, the system have worked well and river water have gotten cleaner. However after several years, because of lack of maintenance and mis-operatoin, it does not work well and river water getting back bad situation.
Theoretically the system should be work well, however in the village there are many uncertainties.
In order to understand current problem. we did field research and questionnaire survey. We came to the village and talk to them about the project.
Through the field survey we figure out these barriers
1) Lack of awareness
We talked to villagers about quality of river water. But many villagers don’t aware or don’t care about heavily polluted water.Because time and effort for maintenance river is not reasonable for keeping clean river for villagers. They are already get used to that polluted river.
2) Lack of responsibility
They agree that clean river is important for environment. But no one feel responsibility to keep the river clean.
Most of them think it is government or ITB researcher’s business, not their business.
3) Defects of Technology
During the field survey, many villagers complain that some problem happen with the system. For example, it smells from pipe line, After heavy rain it flood or clogging in the pipeline and so on.
Indeed mis operation such as villagers throw plastic bag or food waste into the pipeline or lack of maintenance might lead this problem, however once villagers doubt the effect of the technology, they never cooperate with project operation.
For project relationship between professional and local people is necessary.In order to make them trust project team, technology must be designed carefully to handle every possible situation.
This is exactly idea of appropriate technology I think.
Affordability, easy use, easy management, and culture friendly design.
All engineers should keep this idea in our mind.
Yuji Hirai