Toxic tides: life in Indonesia’s most polluted village

Once a pristine fishing hamlet, Tanjung Uma is now drowning in garbage and disease as it bears the brunt of unchecked waste and environmental collapse

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An aerial view of the trash that accumulates in Tanjung Uma, Indonesia. Photo: Seven Clean Seas

Published: 8:00am, 15 Feb 2025

When the November storms unleashed their fury on the Indonesian island of Batam, Dewi Puspalani and her 70-year-old mother-in-law, Mayuteh, scrambled to salvage what they could. The family’s prized possessions – a small refrigerator and a few other appliances – were hoisted onto a table.

Her husband stashed away the charcoal grill he used to run their modest food business, while the family’s five children were sent to higher ground to shelter with relatives. Rain hammered down on their two-room shack, leaking through the roof and soaking clothes hung indoors. Then came the floodwaters – dark, foul and relentless.

As a toxic, knee-deep tide of sewage, garbage and industrial waste surged through their home, Puspalani and her family prayed.

For the 9,000 or so households in Tanjung Uma, a coastal village on the northern edge of Batam, this scene is as desperate as it is bleakly routine. Once a tranquil fishing community, Tanjung Uma is now ground zero for Indonesia’s pollution crisis – a place where unchecked development, environmental degradation and government neglect collide.

“When I first moved here in 1980, there weren’t many people and the sea was blue,” Mayuteh told This Week in Asia. “Now it’s really dirty and the storms just make it worse.”

A food stall in Tanjung Uma next to a trash-strewn waterway. Photo: Ken Kwek

‘Most polluted village’

Batam’s population has exploded from just 47,000 in 1980 to more than 1.2 million today, fuelled by its oil and shipbuilding industries. But this rapid growth has come at a devastating cost to its environment, especially in Tanjung Uma.