BANGUN, Indonesia _ Few Americans have heard of this village, wedged between peanut farms and a paper mill on the island of Java. But the people here have gained an intimate familiarity with the United States _ by rooting around in its trash.
They have combed through ripped sleeves of Oreos, empty packages of Trader Joe's meatballs, discarded "Lord of the Rings" DVDs and dented plastic shampoo bottles. They have even discovered the occasional $20 bill.
"It's amazing sometimes," marveled 43-year-old Eko Wahyudi, "what American people throw away."
He is one of the many scrap dealers in Bangun, a village of 1,500 families at the receiving end of a transoceanic waste trade worth more than $1.5 billion a year.
The U.S. and other wealthy nations have long sent cargo ships of scrap to Asia, where it is sorted and recycled to fuel industries hungry for raw materials. Indonesia imports large amounts of used paper to turn into cardboard.
A dirty secret of the waste trade, however, is that the paper shipments often include other garbage _ such as municipal trash _ that can't be used in manufacturing.
But even that has value in Indonesia. Paper mills sell the trash to nearby villages, where cottage industries have popped up to pick through it and extract any remaining value.
In Bangun, where most of the 1,500 families work in waste, recyclers are after aluminum cans, metal wire and hard plastic that can be cleaned and fed back into industrial use.
Whatever can't be resold _ colored soda bottles, grocery bags, food packaging _ winds up lining the roadsides and blanketing fields, catching in trees, tumbling into waterways and turning the village into what some describe as a toxic dump.
The arrangement may not last much longer.
Under pressure from environmental groups, Indonesia and other Asian nations have started cracking down on imports of foreign waste in an effort to reduce soil, water and air pollution.
Since June, Indonesian officials have sent more than 330 containers of waste back to where they came from _ including at least 148 to the United States _ because the shipments violated laws against importing household trash or hazardous materials. Hundreds more containers have been seized and are under investigation.
Environmentalists cheered the news. Residents of Bangun had a different reaction.
"Waste from the U.S. means jobs here," said Wahyudi, who once employed 20 workers to sort trash outside his green-painted house, paying them about $3.50 per day.
As his revenue plunged by 80% this summer, he let several workers go and shifted others to part-time hours.
"Everyone here depends on this trade _ the rich and the poor," he said. "Without it, our village suffers."
