Bank Indonesia places small business at the centre of the waste value chain

A waste session inside a small business fair

On 23 August 2026, at the Jakarta International Convention Center, a Sustainable Talk session on waste management and added value closed out Karya Kreatif Indonesia 2026. The four day event, running from 20 to 23 August across Halls A and B, brought together 550 small enterprises exhibiting in person and a further 1,300 taking part online, with 27 ministries and agencies and 34 strategic partners involved.

The session was opened by Ricky Perdana Gozali, Deputy Governor of Bank Indonesia, and by Uus Kuswanto, Regional Secretary of the Jakarta provincial government, representing the governor. The speakers were Kurniawan Agung from Bank Indonesia's department for inclusive and green finance economics, Dudi Gardesi Asikin from the Jakarta Environmental Services Department, and M. Bijaksana Junerosano of Waste4Change.

The setting is the point worth noticing. This was not an environment conference with a small business panel attached. It was a small business fair, organised by the central bank, that placed waste management on its main programme. That framing treats material recovery as an enterprise question rather than only a sanitation one.

Gozali set out the shift the session was built around.

We need to move from the waste problem, to waste management, to making waste something that carries added value.

The national figures behind the session

Bank Indonesia presented the national position drawn from the national waste management information system. In 2025, 244 districts and cities recorded 24.8 million tonnes of waste. Around 65 percent of that total is not yet properly managed.

Read as a sanitation statistic, that share describes a service gap. Read as an enterprise statistic, it describes unpriced material sitting outside any value chain. Both readings are accurate, and the second is the one the session was organised to advance. Material that is collected, sorted and specified becomes feedstock. Material that is not stays a disposal cost.

That distinction is where small enterprises have a genuine structural advantage. Aggregation, sorting, cleaning and light remanufacturing are labour intensive, geographically dispersed and difficult to centralise. They are poorly suited to a single large facility and well suited to many small operators working close to where material is generated. The constraint on those operators is rarely willingness. It is access to technology, to markets and to technical support, which is precisely the set of gaps a central bank programme can address.

What Bank Indonesia committed

Three commitments came out of the session, and each is concrete enough to follow.

The first is the publication of guidelines for sustainable small enterprise business models, giving operators a documented template rather than requiring each to design a circular business from scratch.

The second is PERWIRA INTAN 2026, the competition for inclusive and sustainable entrepreneurship. It drew 1,950 registrations from entrepreneurs, academics and members of the public. From those, 200 proposals are selected for training and mentoring. Five leading innovations then receive business matching facilitation, partnership with Bank Indonesia and study visits to established agricultural operators.

The funnel is worth reading carefully. A competition that ends at an awards ceremony changes little. This one narrows deliberately toward business matching, which is the step where an innovation meets a buyer. The 200 receiving training matter as much as the five finalists, because that is the layer where capability is actually built.

The third commitment is internal. Bank Indonesia is applying circular practice to its own operations, converting waste paper from currency processing into souvenirs and into biochar soil amendment, working with small enterprises to do it. An institution that has run the conversion inside its own building can specify the process credibly to others.

The Jakarta piece of the picture

Dudi Gardesi Asikin brought the operational layer from the city side. Jakarta's approach rests on Governor's Instruction Number 5 of 2026, which requires households to separate waste at source into four streams: organic, inorganic, hazardous material, and residue.

The four stream split matters for the enterprise argument. A two way organic and inorganic split produces mixed recyclables that still need secondary sorting before anyone will buy them. Separating hazardous material out as its own stream raises the quality and the safety of what remains, which is what makes the inorganic fraction worth collecting commercially. Jakarta's instruction, in other words, is not only a sanitation rule. It is a specification for feedstock quality.

Pairing that with the central bank's financing and market access work is the useful combination. A city rule improves the material. A financing programme builds the operators who can use it. Neither achieves much on its own.

Sirkularium's view for government and public institutions

Three observations for policymakers.

First, on where circular economy policy is hosted. Placing waste on the programme of a central bank small business event, opened by a deputy governor and a provincial secretary, signals that this is being treated as economic policy and not solely environmental policy. That matters for budget lines and for which agencies feel ownership. Provincial and district governments should consider whether their own circular economy work is housed in an environment agency alone, and whether the economic and cooperative agencies are in the room.

Second, on the shape of support. The PERWIRA INTAN structure, with 1,950 entries narrowing to 200 receiving mentoring and 5 reaching business matching, is a reasonable template for regional replication. The critical element is that support does not stop at the award. Local governments running similar competitions should build the matching step in from the start, and should publish what the five matched enterprises actually sell and to whom.

Third, on data. The 24.8 million tonne figure comes from 244 districts and cities. Indonesia has considerably more than that, so the national picture is assembled from partial reporting. That is not a criticism of the system, which is improving, but it does mean the 65 percent unmanaged share should be read as the best available estimate rather than a census. Districts that are not yet reporting into the national system would strengthen both national planning and their own investment case by doing so, because an investor pricing a recovery facility needs a defensible volume number.

What to watch next: the publication of the sustainable business model guidelines, the identity of the five PERWIRA INTAN innovations that reach business matching and the buyers they are matched with, and whether Jakarta's four stream separation produces a measurable improvement in the quality of material reaching waste banks and recyclers.

The useful idea from this session is simple enough to carry into a budget discussion. Waste that is properly separated is inventory. Sirkularium will continue following how that idea is financed.