Spend too much of your time stuck in Jakarta’s clogged and grimy streets, and it’s very easy to forget just what a large and fascinating place the rest of Indonesia is. Clearly I do spend too much time in Jakarta, because every time I leave I find I’m shocked by that other, non-Jakarta, Indonesia. Places where the air is breathable, the traffic isn’t a snarl, people aren’t living on top of each other and there are trees and birds. Even in super-populated Java (the most lived-on island in the world, don’t you know), I still find places that are very livable and even in some cases, stunningly beautifull.
Luckily because of my work for Holcim Indonesia, I got a chance to get a good look at two cities on the opposite sides of Java, Cilacap and Tuban, that I’d never been to before. These weren’t stunningly attractive in any picture-post-card-kind-of-way, however, I was equally impressed by each. Both had all the hallmarks of well-managed, well planned municipalities, where residential areas were supported by adequate infrastructure, private and public, waste was kept under control and there were no beggars. These were cities where government and industry were clearly working together, and making a difference.
A typical Tuban street scene.
One of these industries, it turned out, was the cement industry. I was in Cilacap and Tuban to look at two important phases of Holcim Indonesia’s operations, an existing cement plant in Cilacap, and a Greenfield operation just beginning construction in Tuban.
Chilling Out in Cilacap
In Cilacap, Holcim’s cement plant is clearly one of two main businesses in this modest town – the other is state oil and gas company Pertamina’s Cilacap Refinery, and the size of both these operations mean their silos and oil domes are clearly visible when you drive into Cilacap from the airport. There is also one other altogether less-visible industry in the area, however: Cilacap’s port is just a few hundred metres from Indonesia’s famous Pulau Nusakembangan; a prison island of eight jails that also happens to boast rich wildlife and a limestone quarry, all of which I will write about shortly.
In Cilacap, I was impressed by the cement plant’s level of integration with the rest of the town. The Cilacap plant operates inside 80-hectares of Holcim-owned and maintained Hutan Kota, or “community forest,” a large and attractive green belt in the area, which acts as a soak for the area’s carbon emissions. Repopulation efforts mean it is increasingly a home to a wide array of wildlife, including deer, large lizards and native butterflies, as well as some very wild and carnivorous mosquitoes; as one of our photographers quickly found out when he entered the jungle at twilight.
Holcim Cilacap Plant and green belt (top left).
Apart from the forest, the Holcim plant is also involved several important outreach programmes, helping to give local communities new sources of income by encouraging them to recycle organic waste into fertilizer. The pristine way the plant keeps the environment in its area of operations, along with its community programmes on waste disposal helped Holcim Cilacap win the environmental ministry’s coveted “Gold” PROPER award in 2010 for businesses; one of only two companies in the country to achieve such an honor.
After touring the facilities, I can see why. Meanwhile, the town of Cilacap, with its pristine streets and pleasant tree-lined avenues, has been the recipient of an Adipura environmental award several years running. Walk around the town and you will see why.
Holcim is also doing some excellent work with the many prisons on Nusakembangan. I toured several of the prisons personally, met some inmates and saw some of the programmes Holcim was running to help the prisoners save money and develop life skills for when they were released. This included a programme where prisoners were paid to grow trees and shrubs in a nursery. These trees and ground cover will be eventually planted in Holcim’s limestone quarry on the island as part of a government-sanctioned mine rehabilitation project.
The Red Scapes and Green Fields of Tuban
In many ways, Holcim’s brand-new project in Tuban was in contrast to the well-established cement plant in Cilacap, but there were also marked similarities. When I visited in August 2011, Tuban Project Manager Ramiro Velasco was about to begin construction on the main areas in the plant, and much of the site was still bright red from the extensive land levelling. Long, flat and red, in the heat of the midday sun, it felt a little like being on a shimmering Martian plain.
Tuban Project Manager Ramiro Velasco standing on the site of the Tuban construction.
However, despite its early stages, I found clear evidence that social and environmental factors, especially the welfare of surrounding communities, were being taken care of. As in Cilacap, Holcim workers are creating a large green belt around the plant, an area which it is already paying local farmers to plant and help maintain. The plant is also sharing with farmers the water to it uses in the green belt, allowing them to plant mixed food crops in the area, including peanuts and cassava.
More general community development work is also well-established. Several years before the most basic work even began on the plant, Holcim Tuban had established a Community Relations department and officers and was communicating plans and opportunities with villagers and working to develop infrastructure for the local community.
Getting There and Away
Even getting to these places, I was pleasantly surprised. It used to be that travelling anywhere remotely off the main trunk in Java meant bone-rattling drives that could last the better part of a day once you’d made it from the nearest hub airport.
Now, however, with the growth of the Indonesian airline industry there are economical, and yes, safe, airlines that are opening up remote areas, making them a few hours trip from Jakarta, rather than the 10 previously. One of the best of these, Susi Air, we used to fly to Cilacap Airport, an hour and 10-minute flight in a turboprop jet.
Susi Air is capitalizing on industry’s needs to get to hard-to-travel-to places in Indonesia. With modern aircraft, largely foreign crews and top-level standards on maintenance and safety, this formerly mum-and-dad operation has expanded rapidly from a handful of planes to more than 20 in only a few years of operation.
The flight from Jakarta to Cilcap was in a Cessna Grand Caravan plane, a comfortable 12-seater with tour-bus-sized windows that took us over some of Java’s most impressive landscapes at only a few thousand feet; an altitude where glittering lakes and emerald-green jungles open out below you and the black tops of volcanoes poke out of the clouds at eye-level with the plane. What a trip!
