1 Chapter I Introduction I.1 Background Indonesia is an archipelagic country that approximately two-thirds of the territories are marine-waters with an area around 3.1 million km 2 . Indonesia has 17.508 islands and it only has 5 big islands which are Sumatera, Java, Borneo, Sulawesi and Papua. As an archipelagic country, Indonesia has a coastline which is around 95.181 Km long and accounted that 60% of Indonesia's total population lives there. One of the cities that located in the coastal area is Tanjungpinang Municipality, this is the capital city of Riau Island Province, which located on Bintan Island. Overall, it has an area of 239.50 km 2 , the most areas are wetland, lowland and mangrove ecosystem. The regional of Tanjungpinang reach 131.54 km 2 of land and 107.96 km 2 of the sea (Municipality S. B., 2015). Looking at the geographical of Tanjungpinang, no doubt that most of the city population lives in the coastal area. Coastal area and small islands in Indonesia include Tanjungpinang that have a unique potential of economy and ecology that could support the daily life of the local people. The ecological could give life for humans and coastal has another function, such as functioning as a port to support human economic. The high development and utilization of the coasts give more benefit to the area. On the other hand, they have risked such as coastal pollution. Generally, coastal pollution is caused by domestic waste from growing population and human settlement around the coastal region, as stated by (Clark, 1995) that one of pollution causes is domestic waste including the household wastes and the solid waste. These activities will damage sustained and carrying capacity of mangrove and marine biota, which are natural resources that support livelihood. Population is an important factor to support the development of Tanjungpinang. On the other side, they have a chance to create the domestic waste by everyone. In 2 the future, as the increase of population might give a risk for coastal areas such as a water pollution, this case is worrying because several household lives and doing activities in there. Almost all household sewage going to the beach without any treatment. Water Pollution not only by the household, but there has other activity nearby like traditional market, fishery industry, tourism, port, and hotel. Furthermore, several studies already discussed coastal pollution that happened in Tanjungpinang.