Beyond ‘greenwashing’: how we nurture our residential landscape
The importance of responsible development
We have to admit that the property industry has brought lots of economic benefits to locals. However, if property development in the island becomes so excessive that it destroys local culture and landscapes, the island will lose its charm.
As a company run by locals, we from the Nyanyi Bali Development do not want to see the island being destroyed by irresponsible development. Therefore, we take the business of nurturing our surrounding landscape very seriously. Practically, we do this by devising a comprehensive waste and green open space management system.
Of course, in order to do this, we could not work alone. Luckily, we the Balinese people already have a very elaborate local wisdom on how to take care of our dwelling. On a communal level, we know how to manage our waste and landscape to preserve our environment.
Furthermore, we have already cultivated a very close collaboration with the local banjar community. Therefore, we engage them in setting up a proper waste and landscape management strategy for our project. Additionally, we tap into authorities of the custom village in this endeavor as their environmental regulations have much stronger influence than those of the administrative villages.
Public space matters
We began our project’s spatial planning by looking into custom village regulations on parts of local landscape which should not be tampered upon. First and foremost, we ensure that our project site does not overlap with public facilities. Furthermore, the land in our dedicated green open spaces should be dedicated for community use only and to preserve environmental balance. Therefore, we prohibit the development of any projects around our dedicated green open spaces. Additionally, to enhance the green open spaces around the project, we’d also organized a communal tree-planting activity there before we kickstarted the project.
For instance, we ensured that our residential project was located within a certain distance from a nearby river so as not to pollute it. Furthermore, by limiting our residential project to a certain number of units only, we prevented water scarcity from happening in the community. We will describe our waste management strategies in the section below.
Minimizing and monetizing waste
As a Balinese developer, we are already familiar with the best community waste management practices. After all, Bali’s streets are very clean because locals in every banjar take turns to clean them. However, with recent industrial development, there have been challenges related to plastic waste which pollute our rivers and beaches.
Therefore, in this project, we endeavor to combine local wisdom on waste management with the most recent innovations in recycling initiatives. Furthermore, we also seek to familiarize the local communities on our plastic recycling initiatives so they could take part in it.
We think it’s a shame that a lack of ecosystem serves as the biggest impediment to plastic recycling in Indonesia. Furthermore, most people are not aware that they could make money through plastic waste recycling. We try to create a community-based plastic waste recycling activity in our residential project location. Therefore, we are able to manage our waste and help locals monetize from plastic waste at the same time.
This initiative is preceded with a series of educational activities involving local waste collectors. First, we familiarize them on how to sort commercially recyclable plastic in our residential waste bank. Not only that, we also help them create a bank account so they could receive the money from the waste they manage in our residential area. Furthermore, we also work with the Udayana University to come up with a design in which the waste generated by our residential complex could be effectively managed. As a result, the university has produced a prototype of plastic waste recycler with minimum pollution. We will dedicate this initiative to the Beraban village.
When our residential project is finished and its residents start to settle in, we will also familiarize with this system. This way, they could work alongside locals to keep the residential area clean and livable. Two essential elements of high quality of life.