Indonesia’s war on waste

2026-03-20 - 06:33

Speaking at a national coordination meeting in Bogor on 2 February 2026, Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto declared a “war on waste” (perang terhadap sampah). He instructed regional authorities—particularly in Bali—to take full responsibility for environmental cleanliness. Standing before a large digital display showing stark images of polluted environments, Prabowo emphasised that schools fall under regional jurisdiction and should be mobilised to address the problem. “What’s so difficult about it? Whether on a Friday or Saturday, all schools should gather on the beach”. Framing the effort as a shared responsibility, he added: “This is our beach, our yard—come on, let’s clean it together”. If local leaders failed to act, he warned, he would instruct the military and police to deploy thousands of subordinates (anak buah) for regular clean-ups, repeatedly invoking the term korve—corvée labour—for emphasis. Civil servants, he added, should spend at least half an hour each morning cleaning the areas outside their offices. Prabowo framed the waste crisis as a disaster (bencana) and repeatedly returned to tourism. “How could Indonesia rely on visitors if its beaches are dirty?” he asked. The plastipelago Although Bali featured prominently in both speech and imagery, similar conditions exist across Indonesia. As with many environmental problems, it is often the most visible and highly frequented places that turn long-standing or hidden issues into matters of concern. Recent opposition to nickel mining in the marine tourism destination of Raja Ampat illustrates how environmental damage can become politically contentious when it threatens places of exceptional visibility and value. Bali, in this sense, functions as a magnifying lens – a place where environmental degradation becomes difficult to ignore. The speech therefore matters not only for its rhetoric, but because it shows how waste becomes urgent through public exposure. Today, few would dispute the seriousness of Indonesia’s waste crisis. Mismanaged waste poses significant environmental and public-health risks, a point Prabowo emphasised, while digital media—used by a broad spectrum of environmental activists—has made waste pollution increasingly visible. Yet the crisis did not begin with the “wave of trash” that hit Bali during the rainy season in December 2025, even though many of the images displayed behind Prabowo were drawn from this episode. Nor is the call for mass mobilisation new. What stands out is not simply that waste is framed as an emergency—something previous governments often approached ambivalently, treating waste as both a problem and a resource—but the emphatic return to a familiar solution: the mass mobilisation of hierarchical bodies for downstream remediation in the form of organised clean-ups. Having studied Indonesia’s waste crisis since 2018, I argue that this solution is socially and culturally powerful and politically legible, yet environmentally limited on its own. Understanding why it continues to dominate—and what its consequences might be—requires looking beyond policy targets to the practices, meanings, and aspirations that have both shaped and been shaped by clean-ups over time. Public-spirited clean-ups have a long history in Indonesia, where they cultivate social order and perform environmental hygiene. They are closely associated with gotong royong, the widely invoked ideal of mutual cooperation. At the village level, a typical gotong royong might see men erect a tent for a neighbour’s wedding, women prepare food, and young people clean up litter afterwards. Such activities reflect and reinforce shared expectations about cooperation, obligation, and social hierarchy. In this sense, clean-ups function, in Clifford Geertz’s conceptualisation of culture, as both a “model of” and a “model for” gotong royong. Picking up litter after a wedding ceremony in Sumbawa (Photo: author) Although Prabowo did not use the term gotong royong, his emphasis on mobilising youth and his invocation of corvée labour suggest a related understanding of citizenship. Here, gotong royong serves not only as a moral obligation and a generalised form of reciprocity, but also as a means through which the state mobilises labour, often compensating for inadequate infrastructure. Such mobilisation has long been central to sanitation policy. In the late colonial period, communities were compelled to construct their own latrines and participate in preventative hygiene programs. Similar logics reappeared under Suharto’s New Order (1966–1998), most notably in Jumat Bersih (Clean Friday), a nationwide cleanliness campaign introduced in the 1990s to encourage citizens to organise, clean, and improve the health of their local environments. In the early 2000s, despite expanding consumption and a growing middle class, municipal solid waste could still largely be pushed out of view, even when poorly managed (e.g. burned, buried, carried away by river currents, or deposited in landfills). Keeping waste out of sight has since become progressively harder. Growing volumes of plastic packaging and overstretched waste systems – including landfill overflows – intensified pollution and prompted the enactment of the country’s first waste management law in 2008. The same year, the Ministry of Health introduced Community-Based Total Sanitation (Sanitasi Total Berbasis Masyarakat or STBM), a public-health programme encouraging communities to change hygiene practices through five behavioural pillars: becoming open defecation free; washing hands with soap; household water treatment and the safe storage of water and food; solid waste management; and liquid waste management. This initiative, which remains in use today in rural parts of Indonesia, relies heavily on social mobilisation. In practice, such mobilisation—alongside parallel forms of governmentality—often functions less as a complement to public infrastructure than as a substitute for it. STBM campaign banner highlighting the program’s five behavioural pillars, displayed at an event in Sumbawa (Photo: author) In the following decade, the rapid expansion of social media and related forms of activism—together with the widely circulated international research identifying Indonesia as one of the world’s largest contributors to marine plastic pollution—made the material limitations of the legislation visible. In response, the government of then president Joko Widodo (Jokowi) enacted in 2017 a new waste management policy aimed at making Indonesia “clean from waste” by 2025. Central to this policy was the mobilisation of ministries, organisations, and citizens, intended to link upstream waste production with downstream handling under the framework of integrated solid waste management. In practice, however, implementation was largely for show and the policy’s ambitions were not realised. Already overstretched waste-management systems struggled as consumption grew alongside economic development, while promising initiatives such as waste banks failed to scale up or integrate effectively with existing informal recycling networks. By the time Jokowi left office in 2024, progress remained limited. Directing responsibility downwards Seen in this light, there is little in Prabowo’s newly declared war on waste that signals a new beginning. Despite growing pollution, its increasing visibility, and the need for multidimensional response that extend beyond local settings, Prabowo’s call for mobilisation appears less a rupture than a continuation of sanitation campaigns stretching from colonial hygiene programs through the New Order to the present. The appeal of these campaigns lies in their familiarity: they are easy to organise, resonate with shared moral values, and visibly demonstrate action. Yet that same familiarity also limits what they can achieve. This limitation becomes clear when we look at practices on the ground. During my doctoral fieldwork in 2019–2020, I participated in several cleanups that, although framed as local initiatives, were closely aligned with government programs. One such cleanup took place in a coastal village in Sumbawa ahead of a district STBM campaign. In the days leading up to the event, mobilisation calls were broadcast through a loudspeaker mounted on the village mosque, urging residents to gather to clean the local beach where the event would be held. Schoolchildren were the first to arrive, followed by youth organisations, village authorities, and residents linked to local bureaucrats through kinship and other ties, while other villagers remained occupied with their livelihoods. The cleanup displayed a clear division of labour: children collected rubbish, women raked the sand, and men cleared vegetation and set the piles alight. As in many other cleanups I observed in Indonesia, the material outcomes diverged from official policy aims. Despite regulations prohibiting open burning, the collected waste was simply set on fire rather than transported for formal disposal or recycling. Smoke rising from the open incineration of mixed waste collected during a cleanup event in Sumbawa (Photo: author) Once the beach was “clean”, the newly prepared space hosted the district head (bupati) and the STBM event. Banners and demonstration bins promoted hygiene, and residents were asked to recite the program’s five tenets. Doctrinal memorisation, rote learning, and recitation are familiar practices in Indonesian schools, particularly with regard to sets of five—whether the principles of Pancasila or the pillars of Islam. The former is the ideological foundation of the Indonesian state formulated by Sukarno, the country’s first president. Here, the number five carries symbolic weight. In his 1 June 1945 speech introducing Pancasila, Sukarno justified the fivefold formulation by declaring: “I am fond of symbolism...The pillars of Islam are five in number. Our hands have five fingers. We possess five senses.” Five thus operates as both a pedagogical device and an embodied metaphor, rendering the STBM programme’s behavioural principles memorable, recitable, and collectively performable. During the STBM event I observed in Sumbawa, however, the familiar three-finger “reduce, reuse, recycle” gesture often performed at cleanups was replaced—not by a hand sign for the five STBM principles—but by a two-finger salute supporting the bupati’s re-election: dua periode (two terms). Cleanups thus also serve political purposes, staging affiliation, civic participation, and the promise of development which, in this case, some villagers hoped the bupati would bring to their community. Attendees at the STBM event in Sumbawa making a two-finger dua periode gesture. (Photo: author) Yet the significance of these events extends beyond electoral politics; they publicly rehearse cooperation and moral discipline. This became evident when the same beach had been cleaned a month earlier, more modestly, by a class of schoolchildren from the district capital. As their teacher explained, the purpose was twofold: first, to assist the government in making Indonesia clean from waste; and second, to cultivate in students’ character values such as discipline, hard work, and the spirit of gotong royong. Given that the mixed waste was again set on fire following this cleaning, it becomes clear that cleanups, in this sense, do not primarily cultivate environmental awareness; rather, they help ensure that young people themselves do not become sampah masyarakat (the trash of society). As I observed during my postdoctoral fieldwork in 2024, however, not all cleanups are imposed from above. In recent years, youth-led initiatives have proliferated across Indonesia, driven largely by the expansion of social media. The most prominent example is the Pandawara group, a collective of five young male content creators from Bandung who gained attention during the COVID-19 pandemic through viral anti-litter campaigns. Since 2022, they have cleaned heavily polluted rivers and beaches, mobilising large crowds online and documenting the process in fast-paced videos shared on Instagram and TikTok. Their videos make pollution highly visible, often following a “before and after” narrative: a trash-filled river or beach first appears as a scene of neglect, then as a site of collective transformation. The message is optimistic, presenting environmental repair as both achievable and socially rewarding. Despite their innovative use of digital media, their campaigns draw on familiar idioms, deploying nationalist symbols such as Indonesian flags, patriotic songs, and calls to gotong royong. This extends to the numerical symbolism discussed earlier in relation to Sukarno’s formulation of Pancasila. The group’s name invokes the Pandawa, the five heroic brothers of the Mahabharata, a Hindu epic centred on the struggle to reclaim a stolen kingdom and widely known in Indonesia through literary traditions and performances such as wayang kulit shadow theatre. In this sense, the movement represents an intensification rather than a break with established symbolic traditions. The five Pandawa brothers of the Mahabharata depicted in Javanese wayang kulit shadow puppetry (Photo: Gunawan Kartapranata / Wikimedia Commons [CC BY-SA 3.0]) Their mobilisation attracts thousands of volunteers and, as in the earlier examples from Sumbawa, serves as a ritual of collective regeneration—not only of nature but also of society and the nation. This was evident, for instance, in a cleanup held in Cirebon for Independence Day in 2023 that reportedly drew around 8,000 participants, where the nationalist framing of the commemoration linked environmental action to civic belonging. In a televised interview, a female student remarked that Pandawara “care about the environment and inspire many people”, while her teacher interpreted the event as strengthening Islamic character and moral discipline. Yet participation is not entirely spontaneous, nor simply spurred by nationalistic imagery. School groups, civil servants, and local organisations frequently attend through their institutional obligations. Participation is also animated by the invocation of malu (shame)— a socially productive affect stirred when others publicly demonstrate care for, or disgust at, one’s local environment. One might argue that this notion similarly underpins Prabowo’s “war on waste”, as suggested by his recollection of a visit to South Korea, where an official bluntly told him: “Your Excellency, I just came from Bali. Oh, Bali is so dirty now, Bali is not nice.” The embarrassment implicit in such remarks becomes generative, prompting self-correction and reinforcing the moral pressure to maintain environmental order. Nevertheless, Pandawara’s popularity has encouraged imitation. Dozens of similar groups now operate across the archipelago, many actively promoted by Pandawara through collaborative content creation. Members of one such group in West Java told me: “We used to do clean-ups in our kampung (village), but after seeing Pandawara we decided to turun ke kali (go down to the river).” The shift is not only spatial—from neighbourhood to waterway—nor simply categorical—from local social space to polluted ecosystem—but also metaphorical: participation becomes part of a broader current of digitally mediated environmental activism. As a member of another such group on Lombok told me: “Before Pandawara, I never thought about picking up trash. I didn’t want to touch that wet, smelly stuff. But then these young guys started doing it—making it seem cool—and motivating others to follow their example.” Hence, participants rarely describe their involvement as a sacrifice. Cleanups are social and emotionally rewarding, and public visibility itself becomes a motivation: people join not only to remove waste but also to be seen doing so or, as the participant from Lombok noted, “to feel part of an ecosystem.” This visibility, in turn, attracts corporate actors eager to demonstrate environmental responsibility by sponsoring cleanup activities through corporate social responsibility (CSR) programmes. However, some sponsors include major plastic producers, illustrating how downstream interventions can enable greenwashing and cooptation. For example, in 2023, Pandawara were sponsored by Nestlé, with the former endorsing the company’s single-use water bottles during their clean-ups. While Pandawara have since reflected on and distanced themselves from this endorsement, this example shows how cleanup campaigns allow polluting industries to recast obligations under extended producer responsibility (EPR) as voluntary CSR, leaving others to manage the consequences of upstream production and waste. In this sense, visibility substitutes for accountability. Downstream cleanups are not unique to Indonesia, nor are they carried out only by volunteers. Increasingly, remotely operated vehicles and autonomous drones are being deployed to scoop waste from waterways around the world. Whether driven by influencers such as Pandawara or by technological interventions, downstream responses risk drawing attention away from upstream measures, where producer regulation, infrastructural investment, and behavioural change are urgently needed. In Indonesia, waste collected during cleanups is frequently transferred—if not burned—to landfills already over capacity. Some larger, often foreign-funded organisations, such as Sungai Watch and Plastic Fisher, attempt sorting and material recovery, but these remain exceptions. Clean-ups thus produce visible improvement without addressing the structural conditions that generate waste. As one environmental activist in Bali told me, “without education, we will be stuck in a never-ending cycle of cleanups.” This cycle can also be understood as a whirlpool that draws in environmental actors themselves: even NGOs critical of cleanups often organise them to secure funding or public support for other initiatives, including education. Global concern with marine plastic pollution—to which many of these initiatives respond—can likewise divert attention from land-based risks associated with waste mismanagement, such as open burning. The solar-powered automated plastic pollution removal vessel HIPPO docked on the banks of the Chao Phraya River in Bangkok (Photo: author) Seen in this light, Prabowo’s call for mobilisation does not introduce a new policy but formalises an existing practice with strong social and political legitimacy. While his emphasis on schoolchildren is understandable—given the ease with which they can be mobilised—their participation sits uneasily with educational aims: young people are enlisted to address a crisis they did not produce rather than learning about its causes. From this perspective, Prabowo’s flagship programme of free school meals becomes less straightforwardly “free” if students are simultaneously mobilised as environmental labour. Also, the nourishment intended to support learning risks being expended on repetitive physical work with limited environmental effect. More broadly, gotong royong-style clean-ups enrol only certain segments of the population and do little to prevent littering at its source. If anything, they risk normalising it by creating the expectation—and increasingly the spectacle—of someone else clearing up the mess. The waste-to-energy vision It should be noted, however, that Prabowo’s call to action was also accompanied by plans to construct waste-to-energy plants in 34 cities, reinforcing the downstream orientation of his waste policy. While such technologies risk substituting disposal infrastructure for waste reduction and leaving unsustainable production patterns intact, I suspend judgement here—not only because I am writing this op-ed from Copenhagen, a city where much of the central heating is generated through highly regulated waste-to-energy facilities, but also because blanket opposition to waste-to-energy can overlook infrastructural realities. In contexts where landfills are at or beyond capacity, appeals to consumers to reduce waste shift responsibility onto individuals, even though household materials are largely shaped by systems of production and packaging beyond their control. Moreover, amid inadequate waste management infrastructure, many communities in Indonesia are increasingly deploying small-scale incinerators focused solely on destruction, without energy recovery and with little regulation of emissions or toxic residues. In this respect, centralised facilities operating under environmental standards and at adequately high combustion temperatures may be preferable. Small-scale incinerator at a community-run waste sorting facility in Yogyakarta, Indonesia (Photo: author) Nevertheless, rapidly urbanising and industrialising societies like Indonesia cannot eliminate waste overnight. The question, therefore, is not whether waste-to-energy is inherently good or bad, but whether it is embedded within broader changes in production, consumption, waste governance, and environmental regulation. Although waste-to-energy promises a quick solution with added value in the form of energy, it depends on reliable upstream separation—something largely absent across the archipelago. In Indonesia, municipal waste typically contains a high proportion of organic and moisture-rich material, meaning that burning unsorted feedstock is both inefficient and environmentally problematic. Without sustained sorting and long-term maintenance, such facilities risk becoming costly end-of-pipe ruins or platforms for ribbon-cutting ceremonies rather than structural remedies. Related “Playing” with labour: on collective cleaning in Lao PDR Tidying up for socialism—or socialising? Amelie Katczynski 28 January, 2025 Indonesia’s newly declared ‘war on waste’ must therefore operate beyond the downstream terrain emphasised by Prabowo’s sociotechnical approach. Mobilisation and technological fixes redistribute responsibility, placing the burden of remediation on selected groups of citizens while leaving production systems largely intact. Without confronting the structures that generate waste at scale and the infrastructures that fail to manage it, even the most energetic clean-ups and the most sophisticated waste-to-energy plants risk becoming performative initiatives. This urgency requires moving beyond the familiar tourism framing Prabowo invoked, in which locals clean the environment while visitors enjoy it. Such framing not only fails to acknowledge that many tourists now participate in cleanups themselves, but also obscures deeper issues: in Bali, mounting waste and limited management capacity stem largely from unsustainable tourism and uncontrolled urban development. The task is not simply to mobilise schools and communities, but to align waste governance with regulation, infrastructure, and producer responsibility. Indonesia does not lack willingness to clean; it lacks systems that make cleaning less necessary. Enjoyed this article? Subscribe to New Mandala Keep up to date with opinionated, informed and accessible commentary on Southeast Asia from leading researchers. Leave your email address in the field below and you'll receive new posts in your inbox as they are published. Email Address Subscribe