Hi guys, I'm going to make a video about the I've never cleaned my water. I've removed the water from the tank. I drank it in the morning, but now I'm not brave enough. If we want to find a green source that is thick, it means that the contamination inside is much higher than the one in the sea.
And now, a ban by China is turning Indonesia into a dumping ground for the world's plastic waste. Indonesia is choking on waste. One ton of plastic is dumped every single minute. On its beaches. And in its rivers and seas.
That's half a million tons a year. Shamsul Arifin battles the problem every day. armed only with the most basic of tools.
He is a cleaner on the Chilliwung River, one of the major waterways that flow through Jakarta into the open sea. Former citizens This is from the kitchen Plastic Plastic again For eight hours every day, Shamsul and his crew clean the same two-kilometre stretch. They collect half a tonne of trash in that time.
But work never seems to get done. It's clean now because it was done by our friends. In a while, in one or five seconds, there will be trash being thrown away again. There's dust.
Keep it, sir. If you throw away the trash, because it's already a habit to throw away the trash in turn. This is all high education, sir. Sercana, S1, D2.
That's the people. If they want to have a high school, keep it, sir. If our friends are four, if they don't work, for two days, everything is covered with garbage. There's no water. But Shamsul and his cleaning crew are fighting a losing battle.
With nine major waterways flowing through metropolitan Jakarta, the rivers are convenient dumping sites for the region's 30 million residents. Every day, 30 tonnes of debris are deposited into Jakarta Bay, where the rivers meet the open sea. For Dr. Eti Riani, it's a recipe for disaster. Unlike food and other organic waste that will eventually decompose, plastic goes nowhere. Leave it long enough in the water, and it becomes a silent killer.
So, the existence of plastic is not only because we are afraid of plastic, but we are also afraid of the most dangerous thing here, which is the waste of styrofoam. Why is it the waste of styrofoam? Because it is easier to be washed away. And then it will be easier to remove dangerous and poisonous substances, such as benzene, etc. Another one is like this, so plastic trash that is used once, plastic trash.
In this plastic, there are often additives that are deliberately inserted. It's terrible because it's really... This plastic waste will eventually, even if it takes a long time, will be digested.
It will become a small plastic that we call microplastic. After it becomes microplastic, it will absorb the toxic ingredients that enter the dangerous and poisonous materials, such as heavy metals. So, if this small plastic garbage is finally eaten by fish, then of course it will enter the fish body and the B3 vessel will enter the meat. It's very surprising because the heavy log on the green riverbank has already caused the green riverbank to be damaged. Seafood caught in these waters feed thousands of people that live around Jakarta Bay.
But few seem to know or care about the poisoner hiding in plain sight. If we want to find thick green rice, it means the contamination inside is much higher than the thin one. So, if we consume thick green rice like this, which is stained like this, This is very dangerous for our body because it can cause cancer.
Even in children, especially in pregnant mothers, it can cause miscarriage in the baby who is pregnant. Have you ever heard of a fire that is now widely spread by heavy metal? Yes, but I often eat it.
You often eat it. I just buy the good ones. The ones that look good.
Yes, the ones that don't die. So, green It's risky for us to contaminate. I think it's a real threat.
The numbers are staggering. 9.8 billion plastic bags are used each year, and 93 million straws every single day. But these numbers alone do not explain why Indonesia is one of the world's top plastic polluters. Dr. Riza Cordova is an expert in marine pollution.
He thinks that the country's plastic use is modest compared to its neighbors. But there, awareness is higher, management is better, and the industry is more aware. So it causes the garbage that directly goes to the environment to be relatively less than what is in Indonesia itself. In Indonesia, a lack of funding and weak enforcement of the law have resulted in a waste management system that's highly inadequate.
In many urban districts, less than half of all households have their garbage collected regularly. In some places, coverage is as low as 15%. A lot of this uncollected waste ends up dumped in the open.
BOOMERANG Indonesians throw out about 200,000 tons of waste annually. Not just plastic, but also paper, rubber and leftover food. The lack of proper waste collection is just part of the problem. Even with just 70% of the garbage collected and taken to landfills, the landfills themselves are running out of space. A new crisis is brewing.
In Indonesia, the majority of municipal waste that's collected ends up at a landfill. Landfills are cheap to build and easy to maintain. And in a country as vast as Indonesia, there's so far little incentive to change.
Across the country, there are some 250 landfills, serving 264 million people. In West Java, the most densely populated province, there are 21 landfills. And they are located side by side with communities. One of them is Burang Keng.
About 500 meters. This is my family. My main concern is around here. I can smell the noise.
What is the smell like? Because I have been here for a long time. We've been here for 23 years.
We eat here, and sometimes we share it with our family. We share it with our friends. Hatta has spent all his life in Burang Keng.
and still remembers what it was like before the landfill was built. If I were to speak the language now, it would be swimming. Because the water is clean, I would go from here to there.
I would follow the river. Then I would stop there and go up again. Then I would go back again.
I would go back again with my friends. That was when I was little. That's where I played.
I didn't know that the current revolution would turn into the waste disposal. There are not many places where we can get water. There are no places where we can get water. The pollution is too high.
The water is too high. I have to clean it up. I have to clean it up. I used to drink it. But now I don't dare.
It's not far from being changed like this. It's fate. Like most landfills in Indonesia, Burang Keng operates as an open dump.
The garbage is simply piled into towering stacks, with little control of the environmental problems they may pose, such as methane gas released from the waste and groundwater pollution. What makes it worse is that there is barely any separation from the surrounding farms and homes. The mismanagement of the landfill has upset younger Burangkeng residents like Karsa Hamdani.
He wants a different fate for his hometown and is starting to take action. Karsa has enlisted the help of Bagong Suyoto, a veteran campaigner who works with communities living near landfills. Among his priorities is to make sure authorities give to Burang Keng something known as smelly money.
The waste money is actually the impact of the waste disposal site or the waste disposal facility. So it is a form of compensation to the people around. In Burangkeng, the people are fighting. Kasa shows Bagong one of the landfill's most immediate hazards, the lack of water treatment facilities.
They must be managed well. What is the reason for their complaint? The water that flows directly from here is not regulated, so it has an impact on the rice fields.
The rice fields are dying, they cannot be produced. According to the law, waste water in the landfill should be treated. The garbage to be regularly covered with soil to control the smell. But most of Indonesia's landfills, including this one, are managed by private operators.
And they don't always go by the book. The water is flowing without any serious handling, and the feet fall into the river. And I feel very sorry for this. There should be a better irrigation system, and even there's trash piled up here.
This is a river. If it's like this, it's clearly a loss for the community. It's about the relationship.
You can't harvest, right? You can't harvest, you can't harvest. What Karsa and the others want is to be consulted on the landfill's future. It's urgent. Burang Keng takes in waste from the nearby district of Bukasi, and it's getting full.
Landfill authorities plant a triple that size. If possible, don't expand it. Just manage what's there. Repair it, arrange it according to the people's wishes.
Thanks to urban population growth and an increase in incomes, Indonesia's mountains of waste are growing faster than anyone had imagined. It's estimated that the country produces 70% more waste today than it did 10 years ago. Next door to Burang Keng is Bantar Gabang, Indonesia's largest landfill and the only one serving the capital, Jakarta. Bantar Gabang 2 is facing a crisis.
It currently holds 39 million tons of waste, its towers of garbage reaching 40 meters high. Officials say it will run out of space in 2021. So, almost all the zones are full because of the increasing amount of garbage. A day is 7,500 to 7,800 tons per day.
The deadline is looming. But the future of Bantar Gabang and other landfills across Indonesia is still being debated. The government wants to build incinerators to shrink the amount of waste and buy themselves more time. But there's been little actual progress.
One reason is them. Thousands of people whose lives depend on the landfill. No one has decided what to do with these informal workers.
If landfills get nothing but incinerated ash. At Banthal Gabang alone, there are 6,000 registered scavengers. They are part of a massive informal recycling network based around landfills, salvaging what their fellow citizens throw away. On this day, Chantel is digging for plastics to sell to recyclers.
If you look at all kinds of things, there are PP, like this, different PP, cheap, the price is too rough on the this is the one, if the PE one is loose, the back is also like rubber, it's rubber, Working morning to night, Chantel can earn US$10 a day. In his experience, there's a buyer for almost every type of plastic here, except styrofoam and single-use sachets. Ironically, the most commonly found plastic items in the garbage heap. CHANTEL TALKS IN GERMAN This is not good, it was sold.
That's why no one took it. Because it's not good, the one who took it was this one, hard plastic. Why is it not good? It's plastic too.
It's different, because it can't be rolled. The rolling is not good, it's broken. In a day, Chantel can collect up to 100 kilograms of plastic he knows he can sell. Multiple types of plastic, each sent to makeshift workshops like this one, to be further sorted into separate components, later to be sold on to recycling factories. It's filthy, laborious work.
And despite best efforts to separate the recyclables from the trash, about 40% of what's collected from landfills is still rejected by recyclers. Because big recycling companies in Indonesia only accept very specific kinds of plastics, they have to be high-grade, clean, with no other materials mixed in. These are then used to make water bottles. cups and straws, or turned into plastic pellets and sold to other manufacturers. For many of these major recyclers, the only way to meet their needs is to look overseas.
It doesn't meet our standards. Because it smells and is dirty. It's not enough in the country. It depends a lot. In 2017, Indonesia imported 10,000 tons of plastic recyclables every month.
But in a global market worth $5.5 billion, that's just 1% of trade. Who took the lion's share? China. For decades, China's ever-hungry manufacturing sector demanded more and more raw materials. To feed it, China took in more than half of the developed nation's waste plastic, paper and metal, processing it alongside its own domestic supply of waste.
But much of China's recycling sector is unregulated, leading to severe pollution of its soil, water and air. Eventually, the environmental cost became too high. And in 2017, China dropped a bombshell, a de facto ban on imported recyclables. At that time, after China closed or banned the import of cotton to its country, then there were some things that we didn't expect.
January 2018. Within months, shipments of recyclables from the US, Europe and other developed countries were diverted to Southeast Asia. First to Malaysia, then Thailand and Vietnam. In Indonesia, shipments of plastic waste in 2018 increased 141% from the previous year.
But it was soon discovered that what was shipped as recyclable plastic often came with a nasty surprise. In July 2018, mysterious trucks began appearing in Burang Keng village in the middle of the night, dumping their cargo on open land. Buran Keng sits beside a landfill, and its residents were used to trucks carrying daily garbage from the surrounding districts. But these ones were different. The waste didn't come from communities nearby.
They came from places the Burang King villagers had never been before. Far wealthier places. Australia. Germany.
The United States. Just use it. It's weird.
You can get out of the garbage. I don't accept it. Why?
We have a lot of garbage. In Indonesia, there is a lot of garbage. Why do we have to import it again?
The plastic is imported to recycling facilities. But it's mixed. There's oil, there's even pharmaceutical bottles. If it comes from landfill, it's not allowed. If it contains toxic waste, it's not allowed.
I was shocked. It was amazing. After we arrived, the contamination was quite amazing.
Dirty, low-grade, and some even toxic. Essentially, garbage. Impossible to be recycled.
In frustration, Burang Keng resident Hatta organized night patrols to stop the trucks from entering the village. How did plastic waste from Europe and America end up in a tiny village in West Java? The mystery only deepened when the villagers interrogated the drivers on where the trucks came from.
It's strange. The factory is known as the paper factory. The paper factory is located in Bekasi. But the waste is plastic.
It's strange. It's surprising. 700 kilometers away in the city of Surabaya in East Java, environmental activist Priggy Arisandi had also uncovered a similar phenomenon, this time with the paper recyclers in Surabaya. Why is a paper factory throwing out so much foreign plastic waste? For years, Prigi has investigated how these paper factories pollute the Brantas River with their untreated wastewater.
And in 2018, he noticed something odd. We were suspicious because in 2017, China was about to close its import of plastic and paper waste. We suspected that there was a waste that was coming from China to Indonesia.
Prigi Arisandi shows us some of the plastic waste dumped by the paper factories, all unmistakably foreign. And the most interesting thing is that we also found a lot of food packages that are going to be microwaved. This is not our culture, using microwaves.
There are so many of these. The 22 paper factories in East Java are major importers of waste paper packaging and cardboard, which are recycled into boxes and tissues. It's common to find in each shipment household plastic recyclables mixed in with the paper scrap. The proportion of plastic waste is usually not more than 10%.
But in 2018, that surged to as high as 70%. What is it called? Importing plastic waste. What we do is import scraps, pieces from the industrial waste.
This is not industrial waste, but waste. So this is food packaging. On the side is the product, such as shampoo, then the floor cleaner bottle. This is one example of how developed countries send their waste to our country. Indonesia's recycling industry typically imports about 10,000 tons of plastic scrap each month.
Clean, good quality plastic uncontaminated by garbage or toxic substances. Indonesia tightly regulates these imports, requiring additional permits and checks before and during shipment. But the rules for the paper recycling industry are much more relaxed.
Priggy Arisandi says this opens a backdoor for developed countries to sneak in unwanted plastic waste along with the paper. In return, Indonesian paper recyclers get a cheaper price for accepting the dirty goods. By deceiving documents, documents that contain waste paper, but in fact they contain old plastic. As Priggi's investigation deepened, he discovered what the paper factories did with the plastic waste they illegally brought in. Only some would be thrown into the Brantas River.
The vast majority would be dumped in nearby villages. But unlike Hata and his neighbours in Buran King Village, the communities in East Java didn't reject the waste. They welcomed it. So we took this video in Bangun Village.
In this location, there are approximately five industries that throw away plastic and paper scraps. These images, filmed by Priggi, show the scale of the operation. Sorting waste for recycling has been a cottage industry in these parts for years.
But China's ban led to a huge increase in foreign waste dumped here. Desperate scavengers dug for whatever they could and sold their slim pickings to small-time recyclers who used it to churn out low-quality recycled goods. This was a thriving local economy built entirely on illegal plastic waste from paper factories.
The price is around 6-12 thousand per kilo. We can sell these products and import them to the we can sell up to 2.5 million for a week or 3 or 5 days, we get 2 times 4 How can we find the logams or wires that can be sold in this plastic waste? So people burn plastic and then get these wires.
When the villagers of Banggun have picked through every last scrap of recyclable material, they lay the remains out to dry. Because that's not the end of the line for the plastic. In a few hours, the dried scraps will be ready for sale.
This time, to tofu factories as fuel. Unfortunately, exporters like the US, UK, Canada, and Australia are not accepting the garbage. They have problems because China can't accept it anymore. They already know that we have a garbage problem. Then they hurriedly throw their garbage to Indonesia.
Indonesia is not a place for garbage. Across Indonesia, an environmental movement is growing, spurred by what some have called a waste crisis. In Bali, horrifying images of choked beaches triggered a provincial ban on single-use plastic. Elsewhere, thousands of Indonesians have mobilized to clean up major rivers. So in May 2019, when NGOs sounded the alarm about foreign plastic waste being dumped in Indonesia, the news caught widespread attention.
and then thrown into the river. So there are around 400,000 people who have been supported by the movement Indonesia is not a garbage dump that we initiated. Amid public outrage, the government took action. Extra permits are now needed before paper and plastic recyclables can be imported.
And when these shipments land in Indonesian ports, every container will be inspected. The construction of the dam is a progressive process. It's dynamic, it's not stuck. So our rules must also follow the developments in the world today. Since the new measures took effect, some 1,000 containers of recyclable scrap have been inspected.
About half were discovered to be highly contaminated with garbage and seized. But stringent checks also mean that it takes a longer time for legitimate recyclables to reach companies. The recycling industry says the new rules have hurt business, but authorities are standing firm.
Our industry has been stagnant and has already lost a lot of employees. So there are indeed some businessmen who are naughty in this matter. We don't think about it. But in this matter, don't be beaten equally.
Don't think that this industry is the right one. Everyone thinks that. Whether we talk a little harshly about this to the government, they think that the industry actors are problematic. Undercover Asia is traveling to Banggun village in East Java, which once thrived by processing plastic waste smuggled in through imports of paper scrap.
But after persistent media attention and a government crackdown in 2019, the supply lines that once fed Bangun have now gone quiet. We approach carefully. We're here to see one of the village elders who we've persuaded to tell his side of the story. 40 years ago, Mohamed Ixsan was the first to bring plastic waste into Bangun, sourcing it from a local paper factory, Pakarin.
Since then, sorting plastic has become Bangun's lifeblood, allowing its residents to earn much more than they ever could from farming. For them, China's ban meant even better business. I'm proud to see that my people are not like before. They are very far away from managing the waste. Iksan has arranged for us to meet a few plastic workers and sends us to this field at the edge of Banggun.
It looks like one of the sites where the villagers would process the plastic waste. But these days... The Banggun villagers seem bewildered by the controversy their jobs have created. All they want is for the furori to die down and for things to return to normal.
In Tropodo, the tofu factories that once relied on cheap plastic fuel are coming to terms with their new reality. While the chimney stacks of some factories continue to spew thick black smoke, the telltale signs of burning plastic, others, like this tofu factory, have made the switch to wood. I tried to see, there was almost no smoke. I thought it was very friendly environment. From plastic, the smoke is black and smells a bit.
But from wood, there was almost no smoke and smells a bit. In the past, Comars workers had to put up with the thick, pungent smell of burning plastic. They would also be breathing in poisonous fumes like dioxins and mercury that can lead to cancer and heart disease. Replacing all his burners cost Comar a small fortune, about 11,000 US dollars. It's not something many of his fellow tofu makers can afford.
But with their old fuel supply shriveling up, and the local government's threatening penalties, there's no other choice. The 54 tofu factories in Tropodo have promised to stop burning plastic and switch to wood within the year. For Comar, the decision is not purely about the price.
What's happening in Tropedo is a recognition that old ways need to adapt to new realities. It's an attitude shared by those working to clean up Indonesia's waste. In waste management, landfill is the last, the lowest. It's not the same anymore, it's been there for a long time. We have a new paradigm, new ideas, and innovation to start from scratch.
With various methods and technologies. Bagong says lack of both funding and technology are major challenges to Indonesia's attempt to change the status quo. But there's a more difficult problem to overcome.
I see that the government is starting to care about this garbage. But why do I see the people who are still in a bad state? Is it because there is no garbage dump so they throw it here as well? Or is it that they have to walk to the garbage dump first, for example, with a distance of more than 10 meters? There are many people who are not aware of the environment.
They just think about things that are not visible to them. Without changing the way we think, we can't manage the waste management. Back on the Chilirung River, Shamsul Arifin is deep in yet another shift. Cleaning up the mess created by his fellow citizens. After six years working at the forefront of Indonesia's waste problem, he is sceptical that things will ever change.