East Java names five pilot regions to turn circular economy policy into daily practice

Five local governments step forward in Surabaya

On Tuesday 15 September 2026, at the DoubleTree by Hilton in Surabaya, the East Java provincial government opened the pilot phase of Project InCircular and named the five local governments that will carry it. They are Gresik Regency, Malang City, Malang Regency, Probolinggo City and Sidoarjo Regency.

Deputy Governor Emil Elestianto Dardak led the launch. He was joined by Leonardo Teguh Sambodo, Deputy for Food, Natural Resources and Environment at the Ministry of National Development Planning (PPN/Bappenas), and by Thomas Foerch, Director of the Urban Development Cluster at GIZ Indonesia and ASEAN.

Project InCircular, in full "InCircular: Promoting a Circular Economy in Indonesia", is a technical cooperation between the Government of Indonesia and the Federal Government of Germany. Bappenas is the counterpart on the Indonesian side. Deutsche Gesellschaft fuer Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) Indonesia and ASEAN implements it, with funding from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development. The project was inaugurated nationally in November 2025. East Java held its regional kickoff in Surabaya on 17 April 2026. The September event is the point at which the work moves out of provincial preparation and into named districts and cities.

That sequence matters more than it might appear. Indonesia is not short of circular economy strategy at the national level. What has been thinner is the layer where strategy meets a district environment agency, a collection fleet, a TPS 3R facility and a local budget line. Naming five regions, each with a different waste profile, is a deliberate attempt to build that layer rather than assume it.

Foerch noted that Germany and Indonesia have worked together on this agenda for around fifty years, and that waste management challenges are resolved through sustained collaboration rather than isolated effort. Sambodo made a complementary point from the national side, describing the task as translating a national development vision into local action that people can see and measure.

The numbers East Java is working with

Dardak set out the provincial baseline plainly. East Java generates roughly 6.5 million tonnes of waste a year, and about 25 percent of that is managed optimally. He framed the remaining share as the reason for the pilot, not as a judgement on past effort.

Through the circular economy, we encourage more efficient use of resources, reduce waste generation at the source, and strengthen reuse and recycling.

The five pilot regions each bring figures of their own. Malang Regency generates around 1,111 tonnes of waste a day, of which roughly 15.3 percent, or about 170 tonnes daily, is plastic. Deputy Regent Lathifah Shohib attended the Surabaya launch and welcomed the direction on single use plastics, while noting that restrictions work best when they are introduced in stages and coordinated across agencies. That is a practical reading rather than a reluctant one, and it is exactly the kind of sequencing question a pilot exists to answer.

Sidoarjo Regency reports about 892.26 tonnes of waste a day, of which around 534 tonnes, close to 59 percent, currently reaches the landfill. On present disposal rates the regency estimates roughly seven years of remaining landfill capacity. Regent Subandi has already set an integrated strategy in motion, including a full mapping of TPS 3R facilities across the regency, a digital dashboard to monitor facilities and collection services, and stronger processing capacity at village level. Sidoarjo therefore enters the pilot with an operational agenda already drafted, which is a useful head start.

Malang City recorded daily generation of 731.29 tonnes across 2024 and reported managing 98.68 percent of it, one of the stronger municipal records in the province. Gresik Regency recorded around 391 tonnes a day, or roughly 142,000 tonnes a year, in an earlier reporting cycle, alongside an industrial base that gives it a distinctive material profile.

These figures come from different years and different reporting cycles, so they describe five different starting points rather than a single ranked table. That variety is part of the value. A model proven in a dense city such as Malang has to be adapted before it works in an industrial regency such as Gresik, and the pilot is structured to surface those adaptations early.

What the pilot is built to do

InCircular organises its work into four areas. The first is strengthening strategy, policy and the regulatory framework. The second is private sector cooperation, Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) and financing. The third is capacity development, research and product development. The fourth is improving waste management at the pilot locations themselves, at both provincial and district or city level.

The four areas are linked by design. An EPR obligation on producers only converts into recycled material if collection and sorting infrastructure exists to receive it. Collection infrastructure only holds up if local capacity and financing are in place. And none of it scales without a regulatory framework that gives local governments and investors a stable basis to plan against. Running the four together in five defined places is a reasonable way to test whether the chain holds end to end.

Preparatory work is already on the record. Bintari Foundation, supporting through GIZ, carried out early assessments for East Java that included stakeholder analysis, mapping of the recycling industry, and a material flow analysis of plastic waste streams across the province. Those assessments identified a constraint that headline tonnage figures tend to hide. Despite high volumes of plastic waste, recyclers face a limited supply of good quality recycled feedstock. The binding constraint is sorting and contamination, not raw volume. That finding points the pilot towards upstream separation and towards the aggregation points where material quality is won or lost.

At the April kickoff, M. Yasin, then Acting Head of Bappeda East Java, put the case for the shift in direct operational terms, observing that a continued linear system means landfill requirements will keep expanding. Nizhar Marizi, Director of Environmental Affairs at Bappenas, framed the same point nationally, noting that aligning national policy with provincial implementation is essential to the circular economy transition.

The national frame behind the five regions

The pilot sits inside the Circular Economy Roadmap and National Action Plan 2025 to 2045, which Bappenas launched at the Green Economy Expo in Jakarta in July 2024. The roadmap runs for twenty years with evaluation every five, and it prioritises five sectors: food, plastic packaging, electronics, construction and textiles. Plastic packaging, the focus of the East Java material flow work, is one of them.

The roadmap measures progress through three indicators. Against a 2023 baseline across the five priority sectors, Indonesia recorded a circular material input rate of 9 percent, a product durability rate of 4 percent and a recycling rate of 5 percent. Those are honest starting numbers, and they define the distance the roadmap is designed to close.

The projected return is substantial. Bappenas estimates that circular economy implementation could add Rp638 trillion to national GDP by 2030, create around 4.4 million green jobs with roughly 75 percent of them held by women, and cut greenhouse gas emissions by about 126 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent. In the food sector alone, the roadmap projects an 18 to 52 percent reduction in waste against a business as usual scenario by 2030. Suharso Monoarfa, then Minister of National Development Planning and Head of Bappenas, described the roadmap at launch as the product of collaboration across many parties.

The roadmap sets the destination. Five local governments are now being asked to show what the first leg of the journey looks like in daily operation.

Sirkularium view for government and public institutions

Three points deserve attention from policymakers watching this pilot.

First, on policy. The decision to name specific regions, rather than issue a single provincial instruction to all, creates a usable evidence base. Provinces elsewhere in Indonesia and across ASEAN should watch what East Java documents, particularly the local regulations, tariff structures and service standards the five regions end up adopting. Replication is far cheaper when the drafting work has already been tested somewhere.

Second, on financing. The EPR and financing work area is where this pilot will either unlock private capital or stall. Producers need predictable obligations. Recyclers need predictable feedstock quality. Local governments need a revenue model that does not rest on annual budget discretion alone. Where those three align, offtake agreements become bankable. The Sidoarjo landfill horizon of roughly seven years gives that alignment a concrete timeframe to work within.

Third, on implementation. The Bintari finding on feedstock quality is the most actionable technical insight to emerge from the preparatory phase. It suggests that investment in source separation, waste bank networks and clean aggregation points will lift recycling rates further than additional downstream capacity on its own. Local governments drafting their pilot workplans would do well to weight upstream measures accordingly.

What to watch next: the workplans each of the five regions publishes, the specific EPR instruments Bappenas tests through the project, and whether the province publishes comparable waste data across all five regions for a common base year. That last item is unglamorous and would matter a great deal. Consistent measurement across the pilot set is what turns five local experiments into a national lesson.

Sirkularium will continue tracking the pilot as the five regions move from designation to delivery.