Author Archives: David Evans

A national program to transform Java’s Citarum River into a source of drinking water expires in 2025.A reforestation program in uplands near the source of the river is drawing on community volunteers.West Java Governor Ridwan Kamil tells Mongabay that residents will see improved water quality by 2025 and that there is political will to tackle the crisis. BANDUNG, Indonesia — In a valley downstream from the source of the Citarum River, retired army general Doni Monardo approaches a magnolia tree planted in 2018 by President Joko Widodo to mark the start of one of the world’s most ambitious river cleanup operations.
“The tree planted by the president is growing nicely,” Doni said, as heavy fog lurked over the high ground.
A community nursery here in Kertasari subdistrict has been hard at work planting 47 different species of tree seedlings to help resuscitate a landscape that has fallen into grave condition.
The source of the Citarum River is found beneath the foothills of Mount Wayang in Indonesia’s West Java province. Around 11,000 families grow vegetables in these uplands for a few dollars a day, with much of the produce trucked down the valley to feed around 7 million people living in and around Bandung, the province’s largest city.
Further downstream, three hydroelectric dams, some fishing grounds and countless irrigation sources help provide basic needs for the 50 million residents of Indonesia’s most populous province.
But the Citarum River, which at almost 300 kilometers (190 miles) from source to mouth is West Java’s longest river, is considered one of the world’s most polluted water courses. Vast structures of plastic waste and toxic chemicals have for decades choked what used to be a safe source of drinking water.

The Citarum flows through a densely populated area in Bandung. The city of 2.7 million people is the biggest culprit in the river’s pollution, according to the Citarum task force, but pollution sources are manifold. Image by Donny Iqbal/Mongabay.
Concern over the Citarum is nothing new. Reforestation was identified as a key upriver measure for Prokasih, an early government cleanup program dating back to 1989. In 2005, the Asian Development Bank provisionally approved a $500 million, 15-year plan to rehabilitate the Citarum. It called for scores of individual interventions, spanning community empowerment to data collection, but much of the groundwork wasn’t completed.
In 2018, President Widodo initiated Citarum Harum (“Fragrant Citarum”), a fresh rehabilitation program to transform the troubled river into a source of potable water by 2025. As part of the scheme, the president ordered more than 7,000 soldiers to remove garbage clogging the waterway.
Forestry scientists report that Indonesia’s government is increasingly relying on community groups like the nursery here run by 36-year-old Yusuf Efendi to meet ambitious tree-planting targets.
“Without community involvement and behavioral changes, how can this kind of ambition be realized?” Doni said before leaving the nursery.
Retired army general Doni Manardo visited Kertasari in March as part of his efforts to ensure the Citarum cleanup program runs smoothly. Image by Donny Iqbal/Mongabay.
Some sections of the Citarum are inundated with garbage, such as this location in Baleendah subdistrict south of Bandung proper. Image by Donny Iqbal/Mongabay.
Yusuf told Mongabay that drainage capacity at higher ground has been stretched owing to land clearing by farmers, itself a product of unclear zoning.
“Planting here has been difficult,” he said. “Not so much because the weather is a factor, but because of the human factor.”
Troubled water
Further downriver from Yusuf’s tree-planting sites, evidence of pollution and other impacts remain all too apparent.
Children no longer learn to swim in the river. Water testing has previously detected fecal coliform bacteria at levels 5,000 times the safe limit. In Ciwalengke, an area on the outskirts of Bandung, local people still see effluents from textile and garment factories flowing into tributaries. Water samples collected by Indonesia’s environment ministry have found heavy metals such as mercury, among other dangerous contaminants. And the decline in fish stocks has deprived fishers of an income and households of a key source of protein.
“The average fish catch can be up to 5 kilograms [11 pounds] a day,” said Kuswara, a local fisherman who spends much of his day wrestling with wide nets by the Batujajar Bridge in western Bandung.
Kuswara uses a net to catch fish on the Citarum in Batujajar. Image by Donny Iqbal/Mongabay.
A woman bathes her younger sister with water from a reservoir that fed by a river contaminated with household waste in Ciwalengke village. Image by Donny Iqbal/Mongabay.
But catch volume depends on water quality, and sometimes the 60-year-old returns home empty-handed. Various fish species are increasingly hard to find for fishers like Kuswara, who makes around 15,000 rupiah per kilo of fish, or about 46 U.S. cents per pound. Fish farmers in the Saguling and Cirata reservoirs often report losses from suspected metal contamination, presumed to originate from waste pipes concealed by factories.
Ramalis Sobandi, a researcher with the Bandung-based Tunas Nusa Foundation, said fieldwork in this section of the river has found elevated levels of child stunting. Children deprived of adequate nutrition in their early years run a higher risks of developing chronic conditions, such as diabetes and heart disease.
“In the rainy season [the river] is contaminated with wastewater and heavy metals,” Ramalis said. “There’s residue from fertilizer, from factories, and from households.”
A 2016 report by Greenpeace found almost 1,000 hectares (2,500 acres) of rice fields were contaminated by heavy metals.
Farmers tend to vegetable crops in Kertasari. Nearly half of the 11,000 families in the upper Citarum area are landless agricultural laborers. Image by Donny Iqbal/Mongabay.
Household waste is another major source of toxicity in the river. Around 200,000 families living in the Citarum watershed are estimated to dump their wastewater directly into the river. Anecdotal reports of septic tanks being flushed out into the river are common.
Flood risks
For Riki Waskito, the risks flowing down the Citarum through Majalaya subdistrict can be more immediate. On an afternoon toward the end of the rainy season, Riki observed fast-shifting weather patterns.
“Weather: rain; location: Cibereum-Kertasari; heavy intensity, duration 5-10 minutes; source: eyewitness,” he wrote to his network in the Siaga Warga WhatsApp group.
Riki, 45, has watched flash floods lay waste to property in this area of Bandung for decades.
“Flooding is a constant problem in the area where we live,” he said. “We have to adapt.”
The community group Riki belongs to draws on data published by an array of government bodies — the meteorology agency, the Bandung Institute of Technology’s climate lab, even the national aeronautics agency — to help communicate risks to local populations.
Residents paddle a boat down a flooded street in Bojongasih village. Image by Donny Iqbal/Mongabay.
Riki Waskito uses his phone to monitor water levels on a tributary of the Citarum in Majalaya subdistrict. Image by Donny Iqbal/Mongabay.
Estimates vary, but the amount of solid household waste generated in the city of Bandung is said to be around 1,500-1,600 tons per day. Only around two-thirds of this is subject to any waste-management processing, with the remainder dumped into the river.
In total, the government estimates that 1,500 tons of solid waste enter the Citarum River every day.
Other innovative community groups have coalesced to plug the large gaps in waste processing left by local governments. Sungai Watch, an NGO established in 2020 by three French siblings, has recruited around 1,000 young volunteers to install 100 trash-collecting barriers at various points of the Citarum.
“The key is to build responsible waste management,” said M. Bijaksana Junerosano, director of the NGO Waste4Change.
A backhoe grapples with garbage in the Cikapundung River, a tributary of the Citarum. Image by Donny Iqbal/Mongabay.
Bijaksana said no country could realistically solve the issue of waste in less than 10 years.
“Actually, this waste problem is not a technology problem,” he said. “The formula already exists — the question is more about being brave and whether or not to seriously apply the formula. This is more about leadership and political will.”
Taken to task
Shandy heads the command center for the West Java government’s Citarum task force’s command center. He spends his days watching a mosaic of screens displaying indicators pouring in from sections of the river where Yusuf, Riki, Bijaksana and thousands of volunteers are working to breathe life back into the Citarum.
“The basic concept is to accelerate,” Harum said in an interview in March. “The most important thing is to make decisions.”
Shandy monitors Citarum data on a row of computer screens at the task force command center in Bandung. Image by Donny Iqbal/Mongabay.
The Citarum flows through Bojongsoang subdistrict in southern Bandung. Image by Donny Iqbal/Mongabay.
Civil servants in khaki shirts monitor water-quality indicators sent in from 15 detection sites, which they use to assess progress on the 13 initiatives mandated by the Citarum Harum program. These plans are set for completion in 2025, when the seven-year cycle of the president’s 2018 commitment expires. What happens next remains unclear.
Funding from the state budget to clean up the Citarum was cut from the original allocation in 2020 and 2021.
“If the environment is already damaged as in this case it’s very hard,” said Prima Mayaningtyas, the head of the West Java environmental office. “Not to mention the amount of funding that is required, which is vast.”
As climate change leads to increasingly frequent bouts of extreme weather, scientists say rivers will face greater risks of reduced flow during periods of drought and uncontrolled torrents during rainy seasons.

Dony Manardo observes a magnolia tree planted by President Widodo in 2018 to mark the start of the Citarum Harum program. Image by Donny Iqbal/Mongabay.

A man picks through trash on the banks of the Citarum in Rancamanyar, south of Bandung city. Image by Donny Iqbal/Mongabay.

A tributary of the Citarum flows through a residential area in the Gedebage neighborhood of Bandung city. The conversion of agricultural land has continued apace in Java, the world’s most densely populated island. Image by Donny Iqbal/Mongabay.

Shandy, left, at the command center in Bandung. Image by Donny Iqbal/Mongabay.

The Citarum’s upstream watershed is seen from the air in Kertasari. Image by Donni Iqbal/Mongabay.

Children play amid garbage in the Citarum in 2017. During the rainy season much of the trash is washed away as the flow of water from upstream increases, but the risk of flooding grows as well. Image by Donny Iqbal/Mongabay.

Locals welcome West Java Governor Ridwan Kamil (seated on the left in the front boat) on the banks of the Cisangkuy Floodway last November. Image by Donny Iqbal/Mongabay.

The Cikapundung River, a tributary of the Citarum flows through Bandung, Indonesia’s fourth-most populous city. Image by Donny Iqbal/Mongabay.

The 2018 executive fiat that established the Citarum Harum project made rehabilitation of the watershed the responsibility of the central government. In practice, the governor of West Java, Ridwan Kamil, shoulders much of the political responsibility for a project that is paramount to millions of the province’s 50 million population.
In an interview with Mongabay, the governor, who oversees the Citarum task force, said West Java residents will see improved water quality within two years as officials enforce industry compliance with waste standards.
“In addition, we are implementing communal livestock waste management, as well as tackling the behavior among people who often throw garbage and household waste directly into river bodies,” Ridwan said.
Governor Ridwan Kamil looks over the newly constructed Cisangkuy Floodway, meant to drain excess water during periods of high inundation, in Bojongkunci to the south of Bandung. Image by Donny Iqbal/Mongabay.
The governor said rehabilitation of West Java’s longest river had become a high political priority, adding that policymakers were applying greater focus more broadly on the impacts of climate change.
“In the early days the political will to improve environmental conditions was in the end eroded by political bargaining,” Ridwan said. “Especially [among] leaders who focused on economic growth and ignored sustainability.”
High in the hills of Mount Wayang, Yusuf was drenched with sweat as he inspected the growth of seedlings supplied by his grassroots organization. The group has supplied 3 million seedlings to the Citarum task force overseen by Governor Ridwan. Local residents were given the trees to plant for free, including 110,000 coffee seedlings.
“The concept is sincere,” Yusuf said. “The principle is that it is not how much is planted, but how much will grow.”
Banner image: Residents paddle a boat down a flooded street in Bojongasih village. Image by Donny Iqbal/Mongabay.
This story was reported by Mongabay’s Indonesia team and first published in a five-part series published here, here, here, here and here on our Indonesian site in June 2022.

Chemicals, Community Development, Community-based Conservation, Drinking Water, Ecosystem Restoration, Environment, Farming, Featured, Fish, Fishing, Flooding, Forestry, Forests, Governance, Land Use Change, Natural Resources, Nutrient Pollution, Poisoning, Politics, Pollution, Rainforests, Reforestation, Restoration, Rivers, Tropical Forests, Waste, Water Crisis, Water Pollution, Water Scarcity
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Could a solution to Rome’s perpetual trash crisis really be in sight? Mayor Roberto Gualtieri would like to think so.ROME — For years now, nothing has symbolized the fall of Rome more than its garbage crisis. A trash menagerie of wild boars, violent sea gulls and rats convene to feast on the capital’s overflowing debris. Early this summer, a spate of suspicious blazes at garbage plants and scrapyards — literal dumpster fires — darkened the skies, choked the air, and raised the specter of arson and organized crime.Then, when it seemed the stench of Rome’s garbage troubles could get no worse, a dispute over building a new incinerator for the city emerged as the stated reason for a political mutiny that brought down the national unity government of Prime Minister Mario Draghi in July.On the day of the revolt, as he monitored the unfolding political drama from his office overlooking the Roman forum, Rome’s mayor, Roberto Gualtieri, seemed bemused by the role he and his city’s garbage problem had played in the government’s unexpected collapse. “Formally, the reason is me,” he said.At least Mr. Gualtieri, a veteran of leftist politics, emerged from the wreckage with the authority to fast track the building of a roughly 600 million euro, or about $601 million, waste-to-energy plant for Rome, which he hopes will allow him to succeed where others had failed.“It is not rocket science,” he said. “It’s garbage.”But garbage, and the degradation of Rome that it symbolizes, is a force not to be taken lightly. Even in an oft-sacked city that has seen it all over the centuries, where people have more recently grown accustomed to self-immolating buses, potholes as deep as water wells and myriad other indignities, the garbage — pervasive, pungent and unrelenting — has become the true metric of Rome’s decline.Trash piled next to an overturned dumpster in the Pigneto neighborhood of Rome in July. The garbage issue has stymied recent mayors and even touched off a national political shake-up.Alessandro Penso for The New York TimesSince Rome closed its sprawling Malagrotta landfill, among Europe’s largest, as an environmental disaster in 2013, trash has overwhelmed two mayors, including Mr. Gualtieri’s predecessor, Virginia Raggi of the Five Star Movement, the party that touched off the rebellion that brought down the national government.In 2018, prosecutors sequestered the landfill — owned by a businessman dubbed “er monnezzaro,” or King of Garbage — for failing to contain its toxic spillage. No actual garbage has been dumped there for years, but its treatment plant was still being used to process up to 1,500 tons of garbage a day, before being shipped elsewhere.That is, before it went up in flames this summer.“An enormous plume, gray,” Luigi Palumbo, the court-appointed manager of the landfill, said as he recalled the toxic blaze and cloud that closed nearby preschools and summer camps and laced parts of central Rome with an acrid odor.“It’s unknown where it started,” he said as he approached the plant, its concrete scorched and its melted aluminum panels hanging over the building like carpets hung out to dry.He turned to a burned heap of garbage that had been inside the plant. It was filled with thousands of scorched and bulging plastic bags, melted plastic fruit crates, stray cloths and tires and cans. It, too, has now been sequestered as evidence — but of what, no one seems quite sure.Damage to the Malagrotta processing plant, which caught fire this summer. A landfill at the site was closed in 2013 because of environmental concerns.Alessandro Penso for The New York TimesThe Malagrotta blaze was not an isolated incident, but one of a rash of trash fires that broke out around the city this summer.Mayor Gualtieri sought to sidestep the theory that “there is a conspiracy to stop me,” and his incinerator, by preserving a system in which myriad players, some of them shadowy, profited from Rome’s garbage crisis. But, he added, “of course you consider this possibility, how was it possible this really is happening exactly when we are trying to …” Then he stopped himself.He noted a well-established connection between waste management and criminal enterprises. Experts had determined it was “not self-combustion,” he said. “So that was man made.”And it has exacerbated Rome’s already noxious disposal problem.Rome now has to ship its garbage at high cost to plants outside the city, in what Mr. Gualtieri said was a drain on its resources, a contributor to pollution and possibly a favor to the interests of underworld elements who benefit from Rome’s sanitation paralysis.But while prosecutors continue to investigate the fires, the greatest challenge to cleaning up Rome may be the city itself.A junkyard that caught fire in Rome early last month.Alessandro Penso for The New York TimesRome had “little sense of responsibility for its own garbage, because it’s always thought that public things, being public, belong to no one,” said Paola Ficco, an environmental lawyer who edits Rifiuti, or Waste, a journal about laws regarding garbage. “And we forget that, being public, it’s all of ours.”In the meantime, she added, Rome was a mess, with high grass and garbage everywhere. “It’s a jungle,” she said. “Only boa constrictors are missing. Then we’ll have it all.”Mr. Gualtieri, himself a Roman, acknowledged that his city bred unique character traits. Romans tended to have “behaviors that we find that are not good,” he said, when it came to throwing out the garbage.Restaurants often loaded up bins reserved for the public. The public had a tendency to respond to the packed bins by balancing trash bags on top of them, like a vile Jenga game, or throwing garbage at their sides, forming archipelagos of uncollected trash that attracted all sorts of interesting fauna.But even while the burned plant remains out of commission, the mayor is confident that the new incinerator, on which construction is set to begin next year, and the introduction of tougher fines for a variety of infractions would create a more civilized Roman context. Within it, he said, Romans would become “more sensible about doing their part” and give “the best and not the worst.”Mayor Roberto Gualtieri is overseeing construction of a waste-to-energy incinerator expected to start operation in 2025. He is also cracking down on municipal employees as part of a three-phase plan to combat the garbage issue.Alessandro Penso for The New York TimesAs a former economy minister, he had personally helped procure billions of euros in European Union funds for Italy, with a significant chunk for Rome and other plants in the city’s waste plan. He spoke of an additional 1.4 billion euros from the Italian government to help prepare for pilgrims visiting the city and the Vatican during the 2025 Holy Year as if it were a done deal. And he already had success in attracting private investors to finance the new incinerator.“Money is not the problem,” he said.The system is.The mayor presented an organizational chart of AMA, a company that, among other things, manages collection of solid waste in Rome, and of which the city is the sole shareholder. He said that under previous administrations, AMA had changed chief executive officers five times in seven years, had become inflated with patronage jobs and had directed the majority of resources to garbage collection areas where it was not needed. Last winter, Rome paid bonuses to its workers just to show up for work during Christmas time.“This is a joke,” he said. “This should be studied in university, what you should not do.” Overhauling AMA was a part of the mayor’s three-phase plan to clean up the city.He said the city will have actually hired about 650 people by the end of the year to clean the streets while cracking down on an army of loafers. Officials had begun conducting thousands of checks on employees who perpetually present doctors’ notes certifying that they can only do desk work.“You can see people heal,” the mayor said of the spot checks. “Miracles.”Workers at the Malagrotta waste processing center last month. Despite the fire, parts of the site remain operational.Alessandro Penso for The New York TimesIn the second stage, within two years, the city would put new dumpsters on Rome’s streets, and a third phase would begin in 2025, toward the end of his five-year term, when the waste-to-energy incinerator is expected to come on line.When he campaigned for the job, Mr. Gualtieri said he did not think such a plant would be necessary and that he would improve things by Christmas. He said that it was only when he took office that he understood the mind-boggling reality of Rome’s garbage. His critics, chief among them Five Star, which opposed the new incinerator on environmental grounds, consider him a hypocrite.But, as summer vacation ends and the city fills back up with Romans and their trash, he argues the waste-to-energy incinerator will improve Rome’s environment and be profitable, an incentive he said for investors to get in on the ground floor.All of Rome, he insisted, was on the brink of a new Golden Age.“I can tell you why,” he said, anticipating the natural Roman skepticism and calling Rome an undervalued asset. “It has a lot of margin for improvements.”Dumpsters filled to the brim in the Pigneto neighborhood. The mayor plans to put new ones on the street as part of his trash-fighting plan.Alessandro Penso for The New York Times

An Australian lab shows the possibility of diverting face masks and rubber gloves from landfills—and mixing them into concrete.
[Source Photos: Getty and Lum3n/Pexels]
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Most of the waste collected from the rivers and holding facilities in Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta, is plastic, new field-based research has found.Researchers note that the plastic debris recovered from the surface water amounted to 9.9 grams, or a third of an ounce, per person on average, which is lower than an estimate from a widely cited 2015 study.The researchers have called for a better mitigation strategy to eliminate plastic pollution in rivers and subsequently the ocean.Indonesia, a country of more than 270 million people, is the No. 2 contributor to global marine plastic pollution, behind only China. JAKARTA — The Citarum River that skirts the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, is infamous as the most polluted river on Earth. The rivers inside Jakarta aren’t in much better state, either, with a new study showing that most of the waste collected from the city’s rivers is plastic.
Plastic accounted for 74% and 87% of the total human-generated waste found in five rivers and three holding facilities, respectively, in Jakarta between December 2019 and January 2020. That was the finding made by researchers from Indonesia and Japan in a paper published Aug. 13 in the journal Marine Policy. They also calculated that the plastic debris recovered from the surface water amounted to 9.9 grams, or a third of an ounce, per person on average. That’s notably lower than an estimate from a widely cited 2015 study.
“Our research focuses on debris caught by floating cube net booms and trash racks located in rivers near residences,” study co-author Pertiwi Andarani from Diponegoro University told Mongabay in an email. “[M]eanwhile other research[ was] based on field data focused on plastic debris in estuaries.”
Trash clogs up Jakarta’s waterways, constricting them and exacerbating flooding. Image by Jonas Gratzer for Mongabay.
Jakarta, with its population of more than 10 million people, is crisscrossed by 13 rivers that empty out into Jakarta Bay. The city has a waste collection and recycling system, but much of the plastic waste in the country is still mismanaged and ends up in rivers. The city government has installed barriers to prevent plastic making its way into the open ocean.
The new study showed that plastic bags are the most ubiquitous form of plastic waste, followed by PET bottles, food packaging, beverage cups, drinking straws, and Styrofoam containers.
“Jakarta has a relatively good waste management system compared to other cities in Indonesia,” Pertiwi said. She also noted in the paper that the study was conducted when the country implemented a plastic bag pricing mechanism to discourage the use of plastic bags.
Indonesia, a country of more than 270 million people, is the No. 2 contributor to global marine plastic pollution, behind only China. The government plans to spend $1billion to cut 70% of its marine plastic waste by 2025 with strategies including reducing land- and sea-based dumping, promoting behavioral change, reducing plastic production, policy reform, and law enforcement.
In July 2020 the Jakarta city administration also officially banned single-use plastic bags at supermarkets, department stores and traditional markets.
“We think that mitigation of plastic pollution must be implemented [in an] integrated [way],” Pertiwi said. “The regulations already exist, but monitoring and implementation is hard to do.”
Waste, much of it plastic, in the Muara Angke eighborhood of Jakarta. Image by Jonas Gratzer for Mongabay.
Plastic waste piled up along the sea wall in the Gedong Pompa neighborhood of Jakarta. Image by Jonas Gratzer for Mongabay.
Pertiwi said the national government should also design a better waste management system when developing the country’s new capital city in Borneo to protect the rivers there from plastic pollution. Indonesia produces about 6.8 million tons of plastic waste annually, according to a 2017 survey by the Indonesia National Plastic Action Partnership. Only 10% of that waste was recycled in the approximately 1,300 recycling centers operating in the country, while nearly the same amount, about 620,000 tons, wound up in the ocean. The vast majority of plastic waste ends up in landfills.
“The main thing that must be done is to prevent the leakage of plastic waste from land, both upstream and downstream,” Pertiwi said. “Personally, education about the importance of good waste management must be given at an early stage and not just the theory, but also the practice.”
Plastic waste in the ocean negatively affects the marine ecosystem as sea creatures like whales, turtles and fish mistake floating plastic waste for food, swallowing material they can’t digest. The plastic accumulates in their bodies over their lifetime, killing them or working their way up the food chain and eventually circling back to humans.
Citation:
Sari, M. M., Andarani, P., Notodarmojo, S., Harryes, R. K., Nguyen, M. N., Yokota, K., & Inoue, T. (2022). Plastic pollution in the surface water in Jakarta, Indonesia. Marine Pollution Bulletin, 182, 114023. doi:10.1016/j.marpolbul.2022.114023
Basten Gokkon is a senior staff writer for Indonesia at Mongabay. Find him on Twitter @bgokkon.
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Conservation, Corporations, Environment, Environmental Law, Environmental Policy, Environmental Politics, Fish, Fisheries, Food Waste, Marine, Marine Conservation, Marine Crisis, Marine Ecosystems, Microplastics, Ocean Crisis, Oceans, Plastic, Pollution, Sustainability, Waste, Water Pollution
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An initiative that allows businesses to divert coffee grinds and soft plastic collection from landfill could help drive Victoria’s move to a circular economy, experts say.Key points:Victoria has targets to divert 80 per cent of waste from landfill by 2030RMIT University’s circular economy researcher professor Usha Iyer-Raniga says rapid scaling of these models is needed to meet state targetsA circular economy precinct is a key part of the City of Ballarat’s planEliza Whitburn-Weber started Ground Up Coffee Recyclers 12 months ago, offering to turn waste into a valuable resource.Now she diverts 2,000 kilograms of waste from landfill each week. Ms Whitburn-Weber said she was motivated to start the initiative after moving to Ballarat and noticing a gap in the market.”We thought we could fill that gap and offer a better solution,” she said.Ms Whitburn-Weber takes food and coffee scraps to Mount Buninyong Winery and Murphy’s Patch, who use them for compost on their farms. Melbourne manufacturer APR melts the soft plastics down into oil to create new plastics again.Growing support for initiativeMore than 20 cafes, restaurants and other businesses have partnered with Ground Up, with shopping centre Stockland Wendouree the biggest and most recent sign up for coffee recycling.

Japan is one of the world’s biggest plastic waste producers, thanks to its love of packaging – but a week of going plastic-free in Tokyo reveals surprising solutions.Every Tuesday morning when I take out the garbage, I see clear plastic rubbish bags stuffed with empty PET bottles stacked beside the blue recycling bins. In the ward of Tokyo where I live, the city sets out weekly collection bins for glass, aluminum, and plastic at designated points around the neighbourhood. By 8am, the bins are invariably full, but the volume of plastic bottle waste has been growing faster than municipal governments can effectively keep up with.
Production of plastic bottles in Japan has jumped to a staggering 23.2 billion per year, from 14 billion in 2004. While the country boasts advanced recycling technology, approximately 2.6 billion bottles are incinerated, sent to landfills, or lost to waterways and oceans annually.
Like most Tokyo residents, I’m fastidious about separating my rubbish and always dispose of plastic bottles in recycling bins. But single-use plastics – products primarily derived from fossil fuel-based chemicals which can only be used once – are difficult to avoid in the Japanese capital.
Vending machines selling drinks in plastic bottles line my street. At the three convenience stores located within five-minutes’ walk from my apartment, the selection of single-serving, ready-to-eat items – such as bento lunchboxes and pouches filled with comfort foods like kinpira (burdock root and carrots cooked in sweetened soy sauce) – has expanded. At supermarkets, fruits cradled in polystyrene netting, packed into plastic cartons, and then wrapped in cling film are a common sight. In 2014, Japan generated 32.4kg (71lb) of plastic packaging waste per capita – second only to the United States, at 40kg (88lb) per capita.Excessive plastic packaging is the norm in Tokyo (Credit: Getty Images)Over the past couple of years, I’ve noticed a proliferation of plastic waste in my home. During the pandemic, my husband and I came to rely on takeout and a cornucopia of tasty, time-saving frozen treats available online – vacuum-packed pizzas, plastic-wrapped burritos, and plastic bags full of potato galettes. One day, I realised that plastics made up around two-thirds of our waste. Alarmed by reports that ocean plastic pollution will quadruple by 2050, I worried that we were headed down the slippery slope of convenience that is contributing to the plastic crisis. To find out how much changing my daily lifestyle habits could reduce waste, I set myself the challenge of cutting out single-use plastic over the course of a week.
The plastics challenge
Even before Japan began charging for plastic bags at retail stores, I’d been choosing reusable bags for shopping. Carrying a water bottle and downloading the MyMizu app, which shows a map of refilling stations around central Tokyo, helped me avoid buying water in PET bottles.
To significantly reduce my plastic waste, I focused on limiting packaging, first by cutting back on lunchtime takeaway, which frequently comes in plastic containers, and refraining from shopping online.
Still, excessive packaging is the norm in Tokyo. Shop clerks commonly wrap glass jars in bubble wrap or place loose vegetables in plastic bags automatically at checkout.
Japan’s obsession with packaging has cultural roots related to concepts of “presentation and respect, especially when giving gifts,” says Azby Brown, author of Just Enough: Lessons from Japan for Sustainable Living, Architecture, and Design.
The tradition of wrapping objects conveys “the regard you have for the other person.” In the modern retail context, packaging indicates good customer service: “Customers expect it,” Brown says. “People want to know that the food is protected, not bruised or soiled. The notion of cleanliness is very important here.”
Despite my virtuous intentions, I met with setbacks early on, after a beer importer offered to send me some bottles to try (as a food and drinks writer, I often receive such samples). The box arrived filled with plastic packing pillows, each bottle enveloped in a double layer of bubble wrap.
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The week of my challenge also coincided with the worst heat wave in Japan since 1875 – five hellish days of temperatures exceeding 35C (95F), with soul-crushing levels of humidity. After two days of cooking in my sweltering kitchen, I caved. Dreading the extra hassle of washing and chopping vegetables every night, I began augmenting dinners with prepared foods from various takeaway shops in my neighbourhood.
Although karaage fried chicken was sold in waxed paper bags and takoyaki squid dumplings came in boat-shaped bamboo trays, vegetable dishes like pressed tofu salad and coleslaw came in individual plastic clamshell packages. Leak-prone items like kimchi, a Korean side dish of preserved vegetables, were wrapped in extra plastic, but even fresh bread and pastries from my local bakery were encased in plastic bags.
“We try to minimise the use of plastics, but consumer demand is high in this humid environment,” says chef and sustainability advocate Shinobu Namae, who runs Bricolage Bakery in central Tokyo’s Roppongi district. “Weighing food quality versus the problem of plastics is always an issue, but we try to find a balance.”Japan’s first zero-waste city Kamikatsu has a recycling rate of 80% (Credit Kazuhiro Nogi / Getty Images)Looking for eco-friendly eateries around town, I discovered a list of takeout restaurants that allow customers to bring their own containers compiled by Mona Neuhaus, the founder of No Plastic Japan. Unfortunately, none were located near me. The same was true of a number of Tokyo shops selling food by weight. I was especially keen to check out Nue, the city’s first zero-waste supermarket selling dried foods in bulk and produce without packaging. However, getting there would involve a 52-minute train and bus ride from my home.
Similarly, a trip to one of the Aeon supermarkets in Tokyo with a Loop deposit scheme for reusable containers would take me 38 minutes by train. While these provided great options for the occasional outing, none offered a practical solution for my daily needs. I do almost all of my grocery shopping on foot, within an 800m (2,625ft) radius of my house, so it doesn’t make sense for me to travel across the city to buy food.
Instead, I started buying more produce at mom-and-pop yaoya greengrocers in my area, where whole fruits like pineapples and vegetables such as potatoes and cucumbers are pre-measured on trays and sold without packaging. Even at these small vegetable stands, however, plastic containers are still used for many items such as herbs. Instead of purchasing rice from the supermarket, I found a traditional rice shop I’d never noticed before selling by weight in paper bags only 600m (1,968ft) away. Going to different shops took extra time, but I never had to walk more than 20 minutes to each place.
I continued to do the bulk of my shopping at my local supermarket, which has recently started to sell some vegetables without packaging. When cashiers tried to toss my loose bitter melon and eggplants into small plastic bags or attempted to wrap bottles in bubble wrap, I was strict about refusing.
By the end of the week, these measures helped reduce my plastic waste by nearly half – a good result but not as much as I had hoped.
Asia’s plastics problem
Formerly a problem limited to wealthy industrialised nations, plastic waste is on the rise across Asia – even among developing countries – due to a confluence of rapid economic and population growth compounded by globalisation.
“It’s becoming cheaper to produce single-use plastics, and with globalisation it’s easy for countries, for example in Africa and Asia, to import these items. In such places, clean drinking water often comes in plastic bottles and bags,” says Kyodo News senior staff reporter Tetsuji Ida, who has been writing about the plastic crisis and other environmental issues for more than 30 years.
In 2019, Asia produced 54% of the world’s plastics, led by China and Japan. Roughly half of the plastic waste found in the oceans comes from just five countries: China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. Eventually, plastics break down into non-biodegradable microparticles that pose potential threats to wildlife and human health. Plastic pollution affects almost every marine species, and scientists have observed negative effects in almost 90% of assessed species. While the impact on humans is still unknown, microplastics have been detected in blood, placenta, and breast milk.
Once plastic is burned and ends up “in the environment it’s very difficult to retrieve,” says Melanie Bergman, a marine biologist who researches plastic pollution at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany.Nate Maynard, Taiwan-based producer of the climate podcast “Waste Not Why Not” and former sustainability consultant, points to the lack of waste management systems in many regions as a major obstacle. “When people don’t have access to waste disposal, they end up dumping or burning it, and that has health impacts as well as environmental consequences,” he says, adding that “the human element” is often overlooked in discussions about the harmful effects of marine debris. Improper waste management results in higher risk of diseases such as malaria, dengue, and asthma.
Chemical contamination, says Bergman, is another hazard: “In many parts of the world they don’t have the money to build the kind of incineration plants we use in Germany, so you end up with highly toxic residues that you have to deal with in future generations,” she says.
Japan ranks second in the world behind Germany for plastics management. Although the country has been lauded for its plastics’ recycling rate of more than 85%, the figure paints a deceptively rosy picture of the situation. According to the Tokyo-based Plastic Waste Management Institute, in 2020, only 21% of plastic waste underwent material recycling, which reuses plastic; 3% underwent chemical recycling, which breaks down plastic polymers into building blocks for secondary materials. 8% was incinerated, while 6% went to landfills. 63% of plastic waste was processed as “thermal recycling,” which involves using the plastic as an ingredient for solid fuel and burning it for energy.
“That means that two-thirds of plastic waste is, in fact, incinerated. In Europe, this ‘thermal recycling’ would be considered energy recovery, not recycling,” Ida says, adding that Japan is the largest exporter of plastic waste. “The recycling rate only applies to what remains in Japan.”
In 2020, Japan exported 820,000 tonnes of plastic waste to South East Asian countries such as Malaysia, Thailand, and Taiwan – roughly 46% of the total.
Part of the problem, Ida says, is that Japan’s strategy for dealing with plastic waste places the lion’s share of the burden on consumers and local governments. “The most expensive process of recycling is sorting, which is done manually, and local administrations bear the highest cost. That means the burden is on taxpayers, while companies pay only the cost of recycling – not for collection or internal management,” he says.
Moreover, Ida says that government initiatives, such as the recent law requiring businesses to set targets for reducing single-use plastics have “very small teeth.” Businesses that fail to comply with the regulations will be “named and shamed but there are no fines or legal consequences,” he says. Japan exports roughly 46% of its plastic waste to South East Asian countries including Malaysia, Thailand and Taiwan (Credit: Mohd Samsul Mohd Said / Getty Images)In contrast, South Korea has taken firm action to combat an 18.9% increase in plastic waste brought on by lifestyle changes related to the Covid-19 pandemic between 2020 and 2021. Last September, the government pledged to reduce plastic use by 2030 and aims to become a plastic-free society by 2050. This year, the country reinstated a ban on single-use plastic cups at cafes and restaurants. First introduced in 2019, the measures were derailed by the pandemic but will be expanded to include cutlery and straws later this year.
Taiwan takes a similarly progressive approach to plastic waste management. With more than 2,000 recycling companies and government facilities, the country has a robust recycling infrastructure. In 2018, the recycling rate for PET bottles was as high as 95%, and initiatives such as discounts for those who bring their own cups to cafes and restaurants subtly reinforce the reuse-and-recycle mindset.
Recycling, however, is only part of the equation for achieving a more sustainable society. Efforts to reduce waste, Maynard says, are equally important. Taiwan’s “pay-as-you-throw” model for waste collection – which introduced a pricing system for rubbish bags of different sizes – has helped curb waste. In 2018, the average Taiwanese person produced 850g (1.9lb) of waste per day, down from 1.2kg per person 15 years ago.
“Because recycling is free but trash costs money, consumers are incentivised to buy things that can be recycled. It’s as important as sorting because it brings down waste generation,” Maynard says.Sustainability on a ShoestringWe currently live in an unsustainable world. While the biggest gains in the fight to curb climate change will come from the decisions made by governments and industries, we can all play our part. In Sustainability on a Shoestring, BBC Future explores how each of us can contribute as individuals to reducing carbon emissions by living more sustainably, without breaking the bank.”In the end, we have to raise our voices,” Ida says, describing how civil engagement helped propel the adoption of zero-waste policies in Japanese cities such as Kameoka in Kyoto and Kamikatsu in Tokushima, where the recycling rate is around 80%.
In Kamikatsu, the Zero Waste Academy, a non-profit organisation established to promote the town’s 2003 Zero Waste Declaration, worked with manufacturers to develop repurchase programmes for used products and advocated for the local government to stop disposing of waste in landfills or by burning it.
 “Municipal, not national, governments are responsible for waste management, so they are the ones who are most willing to take action,” Ida says.
The good news is that public support for cutting down on plastic is growing in Japan. But while personal efforts can make a difference, consumers need to put pressure on industry and local governments to effect a real change. On my next visit to my local supermarket, I heeded Ida’s advice to utilise the suggestion box: “Even putting comments in the suggestion box can have an impact if enough people do it,” he says. “It’s a small step, but it’s a start.”
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The petrochemical industry has spent the past few years hard at work lobbying for state-level legislation to promote “chemical recycling,” a controversial process that critics say isn’t really recycling at all. The legislative push, spearheaded by an industry group called the American Chemistry Council, aims to reclassify chemical recycling as a manufacturing process, rather than waste disposal — a move that would subject facilities to less stringent regulations concerning pollution and hazardous waste. 

The strategy appears to be working. According to a new report from the nonprofit Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, or GAIA, 20 states have passed bills to exempt chemical recycling facilities from waste management requirements — despite significant evidence that most facilities end up incinerating the plastic they receive.

“These facilities are in actuality waste-to-toxic-oil plants, processing plastic to turn it into a subpar and polluting fuel,” the report says. Tok Oyewole, GAIA’s U.S. and Canada policy and research coordinator and the author of the report, called for federal regulation to crack down on the plastic industry’s “misinformation” and affirm chemical recycling’s status as a waste management process.

Chemical recycling is an umbrella term that refers to a handful of different processes. The most common ones, pyrolysis and gasification, start by melting discarded plastics under high heat and pressure, either in a low-oxygen atmosphere (pyrolysis) or by using air and steam (gasification). Both processes produce an oily liquid that can technically be re-refined back into plastic. However, despite decades of experimentation, the petrochemical industry has never been able to overcome economic and technological barriers to do so at scale. 

Instead, the fuel produced by most chemical recycling facilities ends up being burned — either onsite or after being shipped to cement kilns and waste processors across the country. This allows companies to generate energy from the discarded plastic, but at great cost to the environment and public health: According to one recent investigation from the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, a single chemical recycling facility in Oregon produces nearly half a million pounds of benzene, lead, cadmium, and other hazardous waste per year, along with hazardous air pollutants that can cause cancer and birth defects. The report also found that, of the eight chemical recycling facilities currently operating in the U.S., six are located near communities whose residents are disproportionately Black or brown. Five of these facilities are primarily “plastic-to-fuel” operations, two are turning plastic into chemical components whose end uses aren’t disclosed, and one claims to be turning carpet into nylon.  

If pyrolysis and gasification can’t turn plastic back into plastic — not economically or at scale, anyway — why does the petrochemical industry want to pass legislation that calls it manufacturing?

Sorted bales of plastic.
Getty Images

Lee Bell, a policy adviser for the International Pollutants Elimination Network, a coalition of more than 600 nonprofit organizations, said there are a couple reasons. First off, it’s a great PR move. What the industry wants, he explained, “is some sort of leverage to prevent regulation, and currently that’s what chemical recycling is.” By convincing lawmakers that they’re giving new life to old plastics, petrochemical companies may be able to stave off more stringent policies to crack down on plastic production. For example, in its opposition to a major plastic-reduction bill that recently passed in California, the American Chemistry Council cited its investments in chemical recycling. 

The other reason is more immediate. Waste management facilities are usually subject to tighter public health and environmental regulations than manufacturing facilities — both at the federal level and by individual states. They may be required to submit toxic air contaminant inventories to regulators, or they may be subject to more stringent pollution caps.

Chemical recyclers don’t want to have to meet these regulations, said Veena Singla, a senior scientist for the NRDC. “They’re trying to duck those requirements and go for the more lax requirements for manufacturing.”

Jed Thorp, state director for the Rhode Island chapter of Clean Water Action, an environmental nonprofit, said he’s seen this firsthand in his own state, in a recent bill that proposed exempting new chemical recycling facilities from waste management regulations. Doing so, Thorp said, would have absolved the facilities’ operators from having to hold public hearings, accept comments from community members, and disclose the plants’ projected pollution.  

The Rhode Island bill, which passed the state Senate in June, was ultimately rejected by House legislators, although Thorp expects it to return next year — potentially with smarter messaging from its petrochemical industry backers. Thorp said he expects groups like the American Chemistry Council to “reinvent the whole argument and talking points on this to be able to better sell it in the future.” 

In response to Grist’s request for comment, the American Chemistry Council rejected the characterization of chemical recycling as incineration and pledged to continue advocating for it to be regulated as a manufacturing process. Matthew Kastner, a spokesperson for the trade group, said that solid waste regulations are often “irrelevant” to the processes involved in chemical recycling and that plastic-to-fuel is “no longer the focus” of most facilities.

A sandpiper feeds in a marsh near a plastic water bottle.
Getty Images

According to GAIA’s report, lawmakers have proposed legislation to exempt chemical recycling from waste management regulations in at least five other states, including Michigan and New York. Other bills not tracked by GAIA may provide financial incentives to build more pyrolysis and gasification facilities or explicitly count them as “recycling” in states’ extended producer responsibility laws. (These laws require plastic makers to foot the bill for recycling the products they make.)

The news isn’t all bad, however. GAIA identifies some positive trends, including legislative efforts in Oregon and Minnesota to accurately define pyrolysis, gasification, and other “chemical recycling” processes as incineration — aka waste management. Those bills were ultimately unsuccessful, but Oyewole said they suggest policymakers are catching on to the petrochemical industry’s strategy. 

“Some legislators are learning more and not letting the wool be pulled over their eyes about what these processes are,” she said. 

Another potentially positive sign: The Environmental Protection Agency announced last November that it had begun to consider whether chemical recycling should be regulated under Section 129 of the Clean Air Act. This would define chemical recycling processes as “incineration” once and for all — potentially delivering a forceful blow to the petrochemical industry’s state-by-state legislative strategy, although Oyewole said it’s unclear whether the agency’s determination would override existing state legislation.

Besides restricting plastic production — which is ultimately the most important solution to the plastic pollution crisis — Oyewole suggested some additional actions lawmakers could take to keep chemical recycling in check. For example, they could ban the burning of toxic chemicals that are frequently found in plastics, such as PFAS. Prioritizing environmental justice could also help. One bill introduced in Arizona, for example, would create an environmental justice task force to ensure community-wide participation and input in proposals to build industrial facilities — like chemical recycling plants — in low-income communities and communities of color. 

Expanded public education may also be needed, Oyewole added, in particular to offset the petrochemical industry’s inaccurate use of the word “recycling.” “Thus far, the plastic industry has succeeded in presenting these facilities as positive and necessary by using the misleading labels of ‘chemical’ or ‘advanced recycling,’” GAIA said in its report. 

Singla, with NRDC, offered an alternative way to refer to the process, joking that she should have used “waste-to-fuel” throughout her own organization’s report. That way, “we could have abbreviated it WTF.”

Cigarette butts: how the no 1 most littered objects are choking our coasts An estimated 4.5tn tobacco filters are littered each year and many end up in oceans with deadly consequencesSome count long stretches of powdery white sand, others are fringed by dramatic cliffs. But no matter the beach or its location, there’s little escape from the blight that plagues many of them: cigarette butts.Spain’s nearly 5,000 miles of coastline are no exception. “On beaches where smoking is allowed, unfortunately cigarette butts continue to rank as the most found waste product and the one with the most significant impact,” says Inés Sabanés a Spanish lawmaker with the Más País–Equo governing coalition.The coalition was the driving force behind a new legal framework that came into effect in April, which allows local councils to ban smoking on their beaches and impose fines of up to €2,000 (£1,700).