The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
Industrialists complained Monday the environmental protection status color coding imposed by the government for more than a decade has failed to take into consideration the variety and complexity of the nation's industrial sectors.
Agustanzil Syahroezah from the Indonesian Petroleum Association demanded the government color rating be adjusted to encompass the differences for heavy industries including mining, oil, pulp and paper processing.
The Ministry of Environment introduced a color code in 1995 to define company compliance for waste processing and other environmental standards.
There are five color classifications: gold, green, blue, red and black.
Gold is the highest compliance rating and black is the lowest.
Companies grouped in the black category are considered to have made no effort to process their waste.
Those classified as red have taken some action but have failed to fulfill even the basic standards.
"The public only sees that a company gets a red code," Agustanzil said during a ministry-sponsored seminar on the application of the environmental color code.
"However, that doesn't mean that the company has not attempted to process the waste.
"The waste procedures will vary from one company to another even in the mining sector alone, because what they dig up also varies."
Agustanzil said it was difficult for upstream mining companies to achieve the green code certification because they dealt directly with potentially toxic materials from the earth.
"For example, we have a regulation on water quality standards that is valid for all kinds of industries," he said.
"But 90 percent of the liquid waste produced by most of the oil sector contains pollutants, whereas the geothermal industry doesn't generate such pollutants.
"The general nature of the criteria for the coding (results in) financial losses (for us), because each industry faces different challenges in waste processing."
He said the government had to address the problem of excess environmental standard compliance costs in the mining sector with what is called "cost recovery in cooperation contracts".
These contracts would see the government bear some of the waste processing cost.
Agustanzil said this was not cost efficient and that a better way of dealing with the problem would be to revise the color code rating to accommodate the differences in the various industrial sectors.
Deputy for management of hazardous substances and waste for the environment ministry Muhammad Gempur Adnan his office had been thinking about revising the color scheme rating.
"We realize that there are different standards for each industry and we are thinking about standardizing the ratings on an equal footing from sector to sector," said Gempur.
"This year we are composing a new environmental compliance color code and in the interim we will no longer publicly announce the color code status of the companies.
"We will instead present the companies with detailed annual progress reports on their waste procedure compliance," he said.
The Environment Ministry, which is open to input on the code from the various industrial sectors, also coordinates with other institutions to formulate punitive measures for companies that fail to comply to the set standards.
He cited as an example the involvement of banks, which would use the environmental compliance test results as a basis for the provision of credit.
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