INDONESIA – Borealis and Systemiq have announced that Project Stop in the Jembrana Regency of Bali, Indonesia has reached financial sustainability and will be handed over to the local government for future management.
In 2019, Borealis and Systemiq partnered with the government of Jembrana, a regency in the south of the Indonesian island of Bali, to start Project Stop, a program dedicated to reducing waste and plastics leakage into the environment.
Now, the Alliance to End Plastic Waste-funded project has achieved financial sustainability and will be solely managed by the local government and community.
Indonesia is the second-largest plastic polluter in the world after China, according to the United Nations.
In a 2020 report, the institution estimated that the Southeast Asian country produces 3.2 million tonnes of unmanaged plastic waste a year, of which about 1.29 million tonnes end up in the sea.
While its plastic recycling rate stands at only 7%, the country has recently introduced five key strategies to reduce ocean plastic pollution by 70% in 2025.
These focus on reducing plastics production and use, diminishing land- and sea-leakage, improving behavioral change, and stepping up funding mechanisms, where support from international organizations is expected to play an important role.
To date, Project Stop Jembrana has offered formal waste collection services to more than 124,800 people.
It sorts waste to be sold for recycling and composting in its material processing facility (MRF) based at Peh landfill, near Negara municipality.
The MRF has a processing capacity of 50 tonnes of post-consumer organics- and inorganics waste per day. It has already created 86 permanent jobs in the community and has collected over 12,959 tonnes of waste to date, including 1,528 tonnes of plastic.
The project runs door-to-door behavior change campaigns, provides waste bins for pre-sorting at the household level, and employs waste collectors to pick up the sorted waste and bring it to the WPF.
Nicholas Kolesch, vice president of projects at the Alliance: “As one of the earliest projects funded by the Alliance to End Plastic Waste, we are pleased to reach the important milestone of handing over a fully functional and economically viable waste management system to the Regency of Jembrana,”
Jembrana is the third chapter of Project Stop to be handed over to the local government for future management, following the success of the regencies of Muncar and Pasuruan in early 2022 and 2023, respectively.
Data on how the waste management services have been performing since entering local management has not yet been made public.
For all the latest packaging and printing industry news from Africa and the World, subscribe to our NEWSLETTER, follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn, like us on Facebook, and subscribe to our YouTube channel.
