Indonesia's waste numbers meet a proven circular economy model, in one Jakarta forum

A school-cleanliness forum becomes a venue for national waste data

On 19 August 2026, Guru Literasi Jakarta (Gliter Jak) and the DKI Jakarta Provincial Education Office held a forum titled "Jaga Sekolah Bersih: Pilih, Pilah, Pulihkan" (Keep Schools Clean: Choose, Sort, Restore) at the Ki Hajar Dewantara Hall, timed to Indonesia's 81st Independence Day and built around the Education Office's new JOSS programme, Jaga dan Olah Sampah Sekolah, a reporting system for tracking waste sorting and processing across the city's schools. Education Office head Nahdiana used the event to restate the operating model behind Governor's Instruction No. 5 of 2026: "Pilah, yaitu sampah dari sumbernya. Angkut, sampah sesuai jenisnya. Olah, sampah sesuai kategorinya," sort at the source, transport by type, process by category.

The forum's more consequential moment came from two speakers who framed the scale of the problem the JOSS programme sits inside, one with national data, the other with a working answer already running in a single Jakarta neighbourhood.

The scale problem: 144,869 tonnes a day, and what BRIN proposes to do with the backlog

Prihartanto, a senior engineer at the National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN), told the forum that Indonesia generated approximately 144,869 tonnes of waste daily in 2025, with 75 percent originating from households, and that the accumulated pile at Bantargebang alone is now equivalent to a 16 storey building. "Indonesia darurat sampah," he said, plainly stating the scale of the national backlog rather than assigning blame for it.

His proposed technical answer, landfill mining, is not speculative. BRIN's Center for Environmental Research and Clean Technology has run the technology at Bantargebang since 2019, excavating and reprocessing legacy waste that would otherwise sit inert. What began at roughly 150 tonnes of waste processed daily, yielding around 30 tonnes of refuse derived fuel (RDF) and 41.5 tonnes of soil like material, has since scaled to 1,000 tonnes of daily processing capacity. Two cement makers now take the RDF output directly: PT Indocement absorbs 550 tonnes a day and PT Solusi Bangun Indonesia (Holcim) another 150 tonnes, with Indocement planning to lift its own intake capacity toward 3,000 tonnes a day. The main remaining technical constraint, Prihartanto noted, is the high moisture content of excavated legacy waste, which still needs to be brought down to meet industrial fuel specifications.

On the household side, Prihartanto was specific about what good composting looks like in practice: "Kalau oksigen cukup tidak akan menimbulkan bau. Kalau bau berarti akan timbul belatung, itu composting yang tidak sehat," enough oxygen prevents odour, and odour signals unhealthy composting that draws maggots as a problem rather than a resource. He added that where a processing model generates a profit, that margin itself becomes the incentive that keeps a composting or sorting scheme running without constant subsidy.

The counter-example: a single RT that already runs a circular waste economy

Community developer Taufik Supriadi followed with a case study rather than a projection: his own RT 08/RW 04 in Malaka Jaya, Duren Sawit, East Jakarta, where he has served as RT chair while building what he calls Survival Architecture Indonesia, a household level system that converts organic waste into compost, maggot feed, layer chicken feed and catfish feed within the same narrow residential alley. The model also incorporates a family food greenhouse, rainwater harvesting, a 10 kilowatt peak solar installation and a neighbourhood waste bank, run as one integrated, resident managed system rather than a single donor funded pilot project.

The results have drawn attention well beyond the RT itself: thousands of five star reviews on Google Maps, visiting delegations from roughly ten countries, an award recognized in the United States, and interest from South Korea, alongside domestic visits from ministries, universities, state enterprises and schools. Taufik's message to the forum's education audience was direct: "Karena ini suasana kemerdekaan, bukan hanya pameran-pameran dengan mengibarkan bendera, tetapi bagaimana menjaga lingkungan untuk tetap merdeka," genuine independence, in his framing, includes keeping the environment free of the waste burden rather than marking the holiday with flags alone. On the specific question of what households can do immediately, he was equally direct: mixed waste can still be sorted after collection, but sorting at home before collection is what actually reduces what reaches a landfill like Bantargebang in the first place.

Why Jakarta is pairing top-down data with a bottom-up model

The forum's structure, national scale data from a research institution immediately followed by a single working neighbourhood model, is a deliberate pairing rather than a coincidence of scheduling. BRIN's 144,869 tonne figure and Bantargebang's 16 storey pile could easily read as an unmanageable, purely infrastructural problem best left to landfill mining and large processing contracts. Taufik's RT provides the missing piece: proof that the household level sorting the JOSS programme and Governor's Instruction No. 5 both depend on is not a hypothetical behaviour change but a system that has already been running, expanding and drawing outside recognition for years in an ordinary Jakarta alley.

Neither piece works without the other. Landfill mining and RDF offtake by cement makers address the accumulated legacy backlog; they do nothing to slow the roughly 75 percent of new waste still arriving from households every day. A replicated Malaka Jaya model addresses the inflow at the source, but has no answer for the 16 storey pile already sitting at Bantargebang. Presenting both at the same forum, to an audience of educators who will carry the sorting message into schools citywide, treats the two as complementary tracks on the same timeline rather than competing claims about which intervention matters more.

Sirkularium's view

For government and public institutions, the useful takeaway from this forum is not the headline waste figure, which mainly restates a scale problem already well understood, but the explicit pairing of a national technical fix with a documented, replicable community model in the same session. Programmes like JOSS succeed or fail on whether household and institutional sorting habits actually change, and Taufik's RT is evidence that a resident led, economically self sustaining version of that habit change is achievable without waiting for citywide infrastructure to catch up first.

The metric worth watching next is less about tonnage and more about diffusion: whether JOSS's new reporting system actually surfaces which schools and neighbourhoods are sorting effectively, and whether models like Survival Architecture Indonesia are deliberately scaled through structured replication, the campus and pesantren partnerships Taufik has already begun, rather than treated as a single celebrated exception that stays confined to one alley in Duren Sawit.