The Bantargebang Landslide and the Invisible Crisis: Who Bears the Cost of the Urban Waste System?

Abstract

Urban waste management is often presented as a technical challenge involving collection, transportation, treatment, and disposal. Yet the environmental risks generated by urban waste systems are distributed unevenly across social and geographic spaces. This article examines the Bantargebang landfill as a case through which to understand the hidden social and ecological costs of metropolitan waste management. Recurrent landslides and other hazards associated with landfill operations reveal the vulnerability of waste pickers and residents living around disposal sites, while the consumption patterns generating enormous volumes of waste are largely concentrated elsewhere. The article explores this spatial separation between waste production and waste exposure and asks who ultimately bears the risks associated with urban consumption. Particular attention is given to waste pickers, surrounding communities, environmental health, and the unequal distribution of infrastructure and environmental protection. Using environmental-justice and urban political-ecology perspectives, the study argues that landfill communities effectively subsidize the consumption patterns of larger metropolitan populations through their exposure to pollution, instability, and health risks. The Bantargebang case therefore challenges the idea that waste disposal is merely an endpoint in an otherwise neutral urban system. A just waste system requires reduction at source, producer responsibility, safer working conditions, stronger community protection, and a redistribution of environmental burdens across the entire urban economy.