Community-based waste management strategy: A Note on Community Empowerment Level in Supporting Waste Bank at Semarang City, Indonesia

Community involvement in waste management becomes one of waste management strategies development from upstream reduce, reuse and recycle. This alternative must be seriously addressed regarding to the increasing municipal waste generation as the population grow. In Semarang City, waste generation has reached 1,207 m per day and will gradually increase since the population growth of the city is more than 1.5% per year. When practiced in household level, waste reduction will significantly decrease the municipal waste generation. The emerging trend nowadays is the existence of community-based waste management centres through waste bank, an informal body managed by the community and sometimes by an NGO, such as Srikandhi Waste bank in Tembalang, Semarang City. This waste bank continuously campaigns community empowerment for waste management. Based on this trend, this research aimed to find out the community empowerment level in waste management. This research used descriptive statistic method based on questionnaires distributed to 94 respondents. The empowerment components being researched consist of economic, mobility, socio-culture, and community awareness aspects. The research found out that the community empowerment level was categorized into 2 levels that are viable (31.63%) and independent (31.56%). The factors mostly contributory to the level were communication and satisfaction of benefits obtained from the waste bank. Regardless the percentages, there were more than 46% of the community which did not understand the system of community-based waste management even though they joined the workshop. This research opens a new discussion on the role of community involvement in community-based waste management. Keywords— CBWM, empowerment, waste bank