Indonesia sets a 53 percent waste handling target for 2026

A modest-looking target with a complicated backstory

Indonesia is aiming to manage at least 53 percent of its waste properly in 2026. That was the figure then-Environment Minister Hanif Faisol Nurofiq put forward when he framed the target against the country's baseline.

"Our current waste management rate is only around 24 percent. By 2026, we are targeting at least 53 percent," Nurofiq said, adding that with consistent implementation the rate could reach as high as 57 percent.

The number has moved since. More recent government statements put the 2026 goal at 63.4 percent, a target President Prabowo Subianto has referenced directly, with the longer-run ambition set at 100 percent management by 2029. Whether the operative figure for this year is 53, 57, or 63.4 percent depends on which official statement is being cited and when it was made, a reminder that a fast-moving policy area produces fast-moving numbers, and that regional governments now planning around the target need to track which version their own province is being measured against.

What "managed" actually means, and why the number keeps changing

Behind the shifting percentage points sits a genuinely complicated measurement problem. According to Indonesia's National Waste Management Information System, known as SIPSN, the country generated approximately 56.63 million tonnes of waste in 2023, of which only 39.01 percent, about 22.09 million tonnes, was properly managed. The national recycling rate that year stood at just 22 percent, and plastic waste alone accounted for roughly 10.8 million tonnes, about a fifth of the total.

More recent SIPSN figures, covering 2025 and drawn from the 244 districts and cities that actually submitted data that year, a narrower and more current reporting base than the earlier national count, show 34.49 percent of waste properly managed, with 65.51 percent still going untreated into the environment. The gap between these figures is not a sign that performance is collapsing; it reflects both a smaller, more current reporting base and the ministry's continued effort to tighten what counts as "managed" rather than crediting waste that merely reaches a landfill regardless of how that landfill operates. Households remain by far the largest source of the waste stream nationally, contributing 56.7 percent, followed by markets at 13.65 percent, commercial premises at 7.58 percent, and public facilities at 7.03 percent.

That distinction, between waste that reaches a disposal site and waste that is genuinely managed, matters because 343 of the country's 550 landfills are still operating through open dumping, the uncontrolled disposal method the government has separately pledged to phase out. A tonne of waste trucked to an open dump has, in the strictest sense, been collected, but it has not been managed in the way the 2026 and 2029 targets intend.

The target that touches every level

The number only moves if local systems move. That means collection that reaches more households, sorting that separates value from residue, and treatment that keeps organic and plastic streams out of open dumps. National policy sets the direction, but municipal capacity decides the result, which is why the government's own circular economy roadmap for 2025 to 2045 treats waste as a resource to be captured rather than simply a cost to be minimised. The 2026 target functions as an early check on whether that framing is translating into working systems on the ground or is still mostly a document.

Money and mandate: the 40-city acceleration plan

The clearest sign that the target is being backed by an operational plan, rather than left as an aspiration, came on 12 July 2026, when Coordinating Minister for Food Affairs Zulkifli Hasan announced in Wonosobo, Central Java, that the government would overhaul waste management systems in 40 major urban regions, including Jakarta, Surabaya, Bandung, Medan, Palembang, Bekasi, Tangerang, and Bali, with particular urgency around overloaded sites such as Bantargebang and Jatiwaringin.

"God willing, we will handle waste management in around 50 percent of the targeted cities by 2027. The plan is to tackle the remaining 50 percent by 2028," Hasan said, asking President Prabowo to issue a decree formally authorising his ministry to coordinate the effort across agencies.

That 40-city programme is where the abstract national percentage becomes a delivery schedule with named places and split deadlines, and it gives regional governments outside the priority list a template, phased urgency tied to landfill capacity and waste volume, rather than a single uniform rollout date. At the 2025 national waste coordination meeting that set the longer-run 2029 goal, more than 1,000 participants attended, including 38 governors and 514 regional leaders, alongside a revised set of Adipura clean-city criteria that now scores institutional capacity and source-level sorting rather than surface cleanliness alone. Nurofiq's message to that gathering was blunt: "This is not mere ceremony. This is a call for real action."

Where the effort pays back

Cities that invest in segregation and reliable collection tend to unlock the rest of the system, from composting to material recovery and, eventually, revenue from recovered materials. The gap is rarely the technology itself. It is the operating model, the data discipline, and the steady funding that keeps a collection system running long after its launch event has been forgotten. The government's own emerging partnerships, channelling refuse-derived fuel to the cement industry, plastic to recyclers organised through groups like ADUPI, and paper to the paper industry association APKI, illustrate the kind of downstream demand that makes upstream sorting worth a municipality's investment.

Sirkularium's view

Sirkularium reads the 2026 target less as a single headline number and more as a planning signal for regional governments, and the discrepancy between the 53, 57, and 63.4 percent figures cited at different points this year is itself useful information: it shows a target still being actively recalibrated as better data arrives, not a fixed number regions can simply plan against once and forget. The authorities that build a credible local baseline now, measure honestly using SIPSN's tightening definitions rather than the most flattering available figure, and treat collection as a service to sustain rather than a project to launch, will find the later, harder targets far easier to reach. The 40-city acceleration plan gives 2026 and 2027 concrete deadlines and named priority sites; provinces not on that list should read it as a preview of the schedule likely to reach them next, and prepare their source-sorting and reporting systems accordingly rather than waiting for the deadline to arrive.