Indonesia has some of the dirtiest rivers in the world, and this team races against the clock to remove trash from them by hand. This is an emergency. A resident living along this river sent a video, and we're here trying to clean it up. The next rain can wash this river plastic straight into the ocean, where it will be nearly impossible to collect. The nonprofit Sungai Watch has cleaned up over 2,000 tons of trash across Bali and East Java in just four years.
We get so much random stuff from like dildos to like condoms. That's the first thing you think. They partner with other companies to recycle the trash and turn it into sandals and chairs. But why is Indonesia covered in so much trash? Can these manual cleanups really make a difference?
Today, the nonprofit is taking a team of 30 people to clean up a river near a seaside village in southern Bali. Gary started the organization with his two siblings, Sam and Kelly, in 2020. But they've been living in Bali since they were children. We saw Bali go from this beautiful paradise 20 years ago when we moved here to a plastic-filled island. The island actually banned single-use plastics like bags and straws in 2019. But some studies say that Bali still makes more than 300,000 metric tons of plastic waste every year. Everything here in Indonesia is wrapped in these little single-use sachets.
So easy to use, you know, one-time use, and it's so multi-use culture. This is some trees and a bridge that have stopped all this floating debris, and this will just keep on accumulating until potentially a flood will come about.. All of this waste was cleaned up in about three hours.
You know, it's always hard to say, but this looks like about two tons, two tons of waste. All of this is essentially plastic that was making its way to the ocean, what most people will see as trash. We actually see this as value. It's like modern day mining.
We're looking for the most valuable piece of trash. And right now what we'll do with this is we'll put it on the back of our pickup trucks and ship it over to our sorting center which is 10 minutes away. The nonprofit has nine sorting facilities across Bali and East Java. This is our sorting booth.
We sort about what comes in today will be sorted tomorrow. At least that's the idea. And they handle about 3,000 kilos of plastic waste every day. They're really sorting everything manually from nits to gritties.
They sort it all into 30 different categories according to material, color, and quality. Every single day, it's monthly for us to collect data and then start to look at the brands behind it. The most recyclable items, like plastic bottles, are sold to recyclers. Workers like Kadek Arianto use the baler to compress recyclable materials into solid bricks that are easier to transport. Every press is up to 1,000 plastic bottles into each 25-kilo cube.
It is very important for me in my homeland, so that in the future, our children and grandchildren can have a cleaner Bali. But only about a third of the waste Sungai Watch collects can be recycled by external facilities. So the team had to get creative with the rest. So actually one of the biggest types of plastics that we collect is split blocks.
To address this problem, they've partnered with a company named Indosol to turn piles of discarded sandals into new sandals. They're long-standing friends. We've cleaned many rivers. together and it was just a nation heaven.
Sungai Watch has brought in over 200,000 sandals since it started, about 3% of its total waste. At Indosol's factory, the trash is ground down and heated in a mixer. The mixture is then placed into a mold, pressed.
and left to sit for about 12 hours. Where we then have a complete block of foam, we will then skive down to sheets, which we will then cut and press into the footbeds of the Sumai Watch Time Dynasol Sandless. The recycled sandal material is used for the midsole, while the footbeds are made of a mixture of natural and synthetic rubbers. A recycled polyester strap is added to complete the sandal.
The recipe for each color is a little different. The sea salt version, which I'm currently wearing, which is this one, has sandals here in the middle, middle sole. It's pretty dirty right now because I've been wearing it on and on. For each sandal that Sungai Watch pulls out of a river, Indosol is able to make a new one.
The siblings also launched another company in 2024 called Sungai Design. It buys plastic bags collected by the nonprofit and turns them into furniture. This design is a lounge chair that is made up of many different pieces, but all made from 2,000 plastic bags collected in Indonesia's rivers. This is the first product of Sonwa Design.
But about 40% of the waste goes to landfills because it's too degraded or too difficult to recycle. Still, Gary sees every piece they remove from rivers as a win. And all the data they've been collecting is valuable too. You know, that is really important for us to...
If you're able to relay this data to the government, it's a really poor issue. Quality, current, wrapping with single-use plastics and, you know, the recyclability of it. Indonesia produces nearly 7 million metric tons of plastic waste each year, and more than half of that is mismanaged. So much of the waste here in Bali ends up on roadsides, in poorly regulated landfills, and at illegal dump sites like this one.
Sungai Watch sends out a team to clean up these places every Friday. When plastic enters a river, it typically comes from sort of these illegal landfills. The local waste problem isn't new.
A 2015 study ranked Indonesia as the second biggest contributor to marine plastic pollution in the world. The problem got worse after 2017, when China announced that it would stop accepting waste from other countries. This led many neighboring countries to accept more, a lot more.
Indonesia's plastic waste imports spiked in 2018. This all led to the government setting an ambitious goal to reduce marine plastic waste by 70% by 2025. But Gary isn't holding his breath. Waste sorting stations are opened, and in a couple of years they are closed down due to lack of funding and lack of operation. Meanwhile, the local waste problem has gotten so bad that it's caught international media attention. Bali is known to the world as the island of gods, but recently, with international media covering this trash epidemic, the plastic waves washing up on Kruta Beach, it's now known as the island of trash. That's why Sungai Watch installed 170 floating barriers like this one across Bali and East Java.
The barriers trap most of the plastic in one place, but they have to visit each site every day to stop trash from piling up. A few organic waste. We wash it here. It makes it a little bit cleaner. Mader Bagi used to be a taxi driver, but during the pandemic, he quit his job to focus on the environment.
I really like this job when nature needs help, nature needs attention. The non-profit experimented with a dozen different models before arriving at this simple and scalable design. After the trash is bagged, the team weighs the day's haul. They record the date, barrier location, and total weight at each cleanup.
They also take a before and after picture. When there is a lot of garbage, we have to pay more attention to the people and the government to help our activities. Because the Wot River cannot be alone, it needs help from all parties. The nonprofit has a team of 132 people working at barriers, dump sites, and sorting centers across the island every day.
What we're doing in rivers is really non-stop. Every single day we'll clean a river, and then the very next day more trash will end up. It's a marathon that we're going against. One of their biggest inspirations was the ocean cleanup, which we actually covered in 2023. It's a Dutch nonprofit that has removed more than 200,000 kilos of trash from the Pacific and learned some really important lessons about how to manage ocean plastic.
The founder, Boyan Slat, started off harnessing natural currents to collect floating debris inside a giant U-shaped barrier. But over the years, they realized that to really make a dent, they had to get closer to the source, rivers. So they invented these big machines that capture waste before it ever makes it to the open waters. They're called interceptors, and the founder plans to deploy a thousand of them.
We filmed with the organization after they installed one at the Rio Osama in the Dominican Republic, which flows into the Caribbean Sea. It's one of the dirtiest rivers in the world, and Carmen Encarnacion has lived nearby for 24 years. The ocean cleanup installed an interceptor about a mile down the river from her home in 2020. The river is cleaner, there is less contamination. The idea is to let the current do most of the work. As trash travels downstream, this 700-foot-long arm redirects it toward the machine's opening.
So what the barriers do is they let the water pass, but they stop everything that's floating. On the roof we have these solar panels. that are connected to batteries, which store the energy so that even at night we can keep intercepting the lesson. Conveyor belts carry the waste to one of six dumpsters.
They can fill up in just three days during the rainy season. Boyne started out hoping to clean the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch, but it turns out it's not really a patch. It's actually two swirling clouds of debris, which often aren't visible on the surface. Natural currents have created five whirlpools like it around the world, called gyres, and each one collects trash.
And there's still a garbage truck's worth of plastic entering the ocean every minute, on average. The scale of the whole thing makes ocean plastic removal practically impossible. This plastic doesn't stay in the big pieces.
It ends up in teeny tiny pieces that are impossible to manage. If there's a way to stop that from entering the system and becoming the minuscule particles that we'll never be able to manage, we need to do it now. Ultimately, restoring a polluted ecosystem requires big changes.
The best way to keep plastic out of rivers and oceans is to make less of it. But Gary still believes change is possible. We simply do a lot of educational sessions here with local communities.
We do workshops teaching local youth and women how to sort. And they've had a few real wins. They've worked with local government to identify heavily polluted areas. And a community in Denpasar released fish back into a river deemed clean enough to have the trash barriers removed. The group is also partnering with two other NGOs to develop an educational program about plastic waste reduction.
They also publish an annual report on the trash they've cleaned and have begun consulting the national government on wider environmental policy. Why are we doing this every day? It's because we truly believe that Bali can be free of plastic.
It will probably take a couple years, but we hope to get there.