Indonesia named as a market for improving informal waste workers' lives

Indonesia becomes the initiative's second market

Indonesia has been named the second implementation market for the Responsible Sourcing Initiative, a multi-year global programme run by The Circulate Initiative, a non-profit focused on ocean plastic pollution in emerging markets. Vietnam was first. India and Kenya are also part of the rollout. The choice of Indonesia is not incidental: the country's informal waste workers, collectors, sorters, and small aggregators operating largely outside any formal system, are estimated to collect around one million tonnes of waste every year, a volume that makes them one of the largest functioning recycling infrastructures the country has, even though almost none of them are on a payroll or covered by a safety net.

In Indonesia, the initiative is being implemented through a partnership between The Coca-Cola Company, Coca-Cola Europacific Partners, the Mahija Foundation, and recycler PT Amandina Bumi Nusantara, whose supply chain has been used as the practical testing ground for the framework. Globally, The Circulate Initiative frames the stakes in blunt terms: an estimated 40 million informal waste workers worldwide account for roughly 60 percent of all plastic collected for recycling, yet most face some combination of unsafe working conditions, no social protection, gender inequality, child labour risk, and incomes far below a living wage.

The workforce that makes Indonesia's recycling numbers real

Recovery statistics rarely name the people who generate them. Yet in most Indonesian cities, material only gets recycled because someone picks it out of a mixed waste stream, carries it, sorts it by type, and sells it on to a collection point, or lapak, that aggregates it for processing. A 2021 study covering 178 respondents across five Indonesian cities, cited by Titik Terang and drawn from academic research on the sector, found that the typical waste picker collects 43.87 kilogrammes of material a day, working close to eight hours. Individual pickers made up 79 percent of the study's respondents, with small-scale and medium-scale collectors accounting for the rest, and 79 percent of the workers surveyed were men.

The same study put average monthly income at around US$91.7, but that average conceals a sharp gender gap: men earned roughly US$128.3 a month against US$69.7 for women, despite working comparable hours. For a workforce this size moving roughly a million tonnes of material a year, that income level means the country's recycling rate is being subsidised, in effect, by wages well below what the work would cost a municipality to replicate through a formal contracted service.

"Our work continues to demonstrate the value informal waste workers bring to the world's pursuit of circularity," said Annerieke Douma, Director of Programs at The Circulate Initiative, describing the rationale behind extending the Responsible Sourcing Initiative into Indonesia.

What responsible sourcing asks of brands and recyclers

The initiative's practical tool is the Harmonized Responsible Sourcing Framework, which gives companies buying recycled plastic a common way to check whether the material in their supply chain was collected under conditions that respect workers' rights, rather than simply tracking tonnage and price. The framework does not certify a supply chain in the way a product label would; instead, participating organisations use a shared evaluation method to assess labour conditions before an intervention and again afterward, so that improvement can be measured rather than assumed.

The initiative's global targets, set for 2025 and 2026, are specific: improve livelihoods for at least 50,000 informal waste workers, secure commitments from at least 25 global brands, investors, recyclers, and aggregators to the harmonised framework, deliver at least 100,000 tonnes of responsibly sourced recycled plastic, and engage more than 500 businesses across the recycled plastics value chain. Paul Lalli, Global Vice President for Human Rights at The Coca-Cola Company, framed his company's participation as an obligation rather than a public relations exercise.

"We recognize our responsibility to help solve complex plastic waste challenges facing our planet and society, and this includes working to secure the rights of informal waste workers," Lalli said.

In Indonesia specifically, PT Amandina Bumi Nusantara's vertically integrated supply chain, where the company controls stages from collection through processing, has served as the initiative's proof of concept. Managing Director Suharji Gasali has said the company is ready to put improved labour practices into place across that chain, and Mahija Foundation chairwoman Ardhina Zaiza has committed the foundation's support to strengthening waste collectors' livelihoods on the ground.

The health toll of working without protection

The case for treating this as urgent, rather than aspirational, is reinforced by what happens to workers who collect plastic waste without protective equipment for years at a time. A biomonitoring study of 32 women waste workers in Gresik, East Java, conducted with Korea's WIOEH, Indonesian environmental group ECOTON, and Airlangga University's medical faculty, found 23 harmful chemicals in the blood and urine of every single participant tested. Bisphenol A and phthalates, both known hormone disruptors commonly used in plastics, were flagged as primary concerns, and lead levels among the women exceeded what is typically found in the general population of developed countries.

Dr Won Kim, one of the researchers involved, put it plainly: "This cannot be taken lightly." Dr Lestari Sudaryanti, commenting on the same findings, added that this level of chemical exposure among an entire occupational group "should not be normalized." For a sector that already earns below subsistence wages while doing work few others are willing to do, the health data adds a second, less visible cost that rarely appears in national recycling statistics.

From pilot to system: a Bogor convening charts the next phase

The Responsible Sourcing Initiative moved from launch to coordination in March 2025, when UNDP brought together roughly 100 participants, recyclers, waste worker leaders, and alliance organisations, for a three-day convening in Bogor, West Java, running from 18 to 20 March. The meeting reviewed progress on the Harmonized Responsible Sourcing Framework across all four implementation countries and included a field visit to PT Amandina Bumi Nusantara's Jakarta operations, giving international participants a direct look at how a vertically integrated Indonesian recycler verifies compliance inside its own supply chain. Sonia Dias, Global Waste Specialist at the international network WIEGO, summarised the underlying principle discussed at the convening: all workers in the informal economy, she said, should have access to equal opportunities, rights, and protections, regardless of where in the value chain they sit.

Sirkularium's view

For government and public institutions, the practical lesson is that data on who collects what, and where, is often already held by the informal sector itself, and that recognising that knowledge tends to produce better planning than trying to replace it. Circular economy strategies that treat pickers and lapak operators as infrastructure to be formalised and paid fairly, rather than as a problem to be phased out, are likely to be both cheaper and more resilient than parallel systems built from scratch. Indonesia's roughly one million tonnes of informally collected waste each year is not a gap in the system waiting to be closed by a new facility; it is capacity that already exists and that responsible sourcing frameworks, EPR-funded collection schemes, and municipal waste banks can all be designed to work with. The institutions that succeed will be the ones that treat wage levels, safety equipment, and health monitoring for this workforce as core infrastructure spending, not an afterthought layered on top of a recycling target.