Makassar's source sorting rule delivers its first measured results at TPA Antang

The number that came back three weeks later

On 1 August 2026, Makassar stopped accepting mixed waste at TPA Tamangapa, the landfill widely known as TPA Antang. From that date the site takes residual waste only. Households, offices, hotels, malls and restaurants are required to separate organic and inorganic material before anything is collected.

Three weeks in, the city has its first hard measurement. Nasrun, Head of the UPT for TPA Antang, reported that daily intake now runs at 200 to 300 tonnes. Before the rule took effect, he had put the figure at 700 to 800 tonnes a day. Reporting on 20 August placed the earlier baseline nearer 1,000 tonnes a day. The two baselines do not agree, and the difference is worth stating plainly rather than smoothing over. Whichever is used, the direction and the scale of the change are the same: a reduction of roughly 70 to 75 percent in the material reaching final disposal, achieved within a single month.

Waste coming in now runs between 200 and 300 tonnes a day, because wet waste no longer enters.

That sentence, from the official who runs the weighbridge, is the practical test of a policy that has been debated across Indonesia for two years. Source separation is frequently described as the precondition for ending open dumping. Makassar has now produced a measured result from a city of its size, and the result is available to every other local government facing the same deadline.

How the gate became the control point

The mechanism is deliberately simple. Officers at the weighbridge inspect each arriving truck. A vehicle carrying mixed material is held at the entrance and sent back to sort its load before it can tip. Nasrun described the procedure directly, saying trucks are held and sent home first if sorting has not been done.

Putting the decision at the gate matters more than the wording of the regulation. It converts a citywide instruction into a single, visible, repeatable check, applied to every load, by staff who already work there. It requires no new technology and no new agency. It produces a daily record of who complied and who did not.

The effect on traffic was immediate. Truck arrivals fell from roughly 400 a day to about 300, a reduction of around 100 vehicle movements every day. That is a fuel saving, a maintenance saving and a reduction in road wear that sits alongside the tonnage figures, and it accrues to the city budget rather than to the environment account alone.

The legal basis is the Makassar Mayor's Circular Letter Number 1 of 2026 together with Instruction Number 3 of 2026. Mayor Munafri Arifuddin has been explicit about why the city moved: continued open dumping exposed Makassar to administrative sanctions and, in principle, to criminal liability. Aswin Harun Kartapati, Head of Sanitation at the city Environmental Services Department, has framed the step as implementing the central government instruction to end open dumping nationwide.

What changed inside the waste stream

The composition figures are the more instructive part of the result. Organic material previously made up around 54 percent of everything arriving at the landfill. Helmy Budiman, Head of DLH Makassar, has identified that fraction as the source of the site's two main environmental burdens, since it decomposes quickly and generates both leachate and methane. In August, the organic share of intake fell to roughly 10 percent.

That shift changes what the landfill is. A site receiving majority organic waste is a methane generator and a leachate risk regardless of how it is engineered. A site receiving mostly residual material can be operated as a controlled landfill with far less active management. Budiman has described the August change as the start of a phased move to controlled landfill operation.

The rule sets out the three streams in concrete terms rather than in categories. Organic waste means food scraps, vegetables, fruit, dried leaves, grass, coffee grounds and eggshells, and goes to composting, biopores or TPS 3R facilities. Inorganic waste means plastic bottles, cardboard, paper, glass bottles, cans, aluminium and metal, and goes to waste banks and exchange centres. Residual waste, the only stream the landfill now accepts, means nappies, sanitary products, used tissues, face masks, cigarette butts, styrofoam, multilayer sachets and heavily soiled food packaging.

Publishing the lists at that level of detail is a small thing that does a lot of work. A household does not have to interpret a definition. Neither does a collection crew, and neither does the officer at the gate.

The part of the transition that needs the most attention

A change of this speed moves value as well as material, and the people most exposed are those who were already recovering recyclables by hand. Reporting on 18 August recorded that waste pickers and private haulage drivers working at TPA Tamangapa had seen daily earnings fall from around Rp100,000 to Rp120,000 to somewhere between Rp25,000 and Rp55,000. At least 130 households, about 860 people including 175 school age children, depend on recovery work at the site. Ten privately owned hauling units supporting a further 30 households are also affected. Civil society organisations including WALHI Sulsel and LBH Makassar have asked the city to address the transition for these workers.

The mechanism behind the drop is straightforward and, in a sense, is the policy working. Recyclable material that once arrived at the landfill for informal recovery is now being separated upstream, so the value is captured earlier in the chain. The question is whether the people who were capturing that value move upstream with it.

Makassar already holds most of the instruments needed. The city is standing up a UPTD dedicated to organic waste processing, and its Bank Sampah Induk is set up to buy compost and maggot cultivation output from residents, which creates a paid role at the neighbourhood end of the chain. Nationally, the social protection scheme for informal waste workers launched on 10 August 2026 cut work accident and death benefit premiums by half, to Rp8,400 a month, and began the process of reclassifying the occupation itself. Connecting the people currently working the tipping face to those two instruments, by name and by household, is the step that turns a displacement into a transfer.

Building the downstream capacity the rule assumes

The rule presumes that separated organic and inorganic material has somewhere to go. That capacity is not yet complete. TPS 3R facilities are operating in only some subdistricts, and the city has set a three month socialisation period while the network is extended. All 14 land based districts are upgrading collection infrastructure and fleet arrangements so that separated streams stay separated in transit.

DLH is also preparing an enforcement task force, with an explicit sequence of education before penalties, focused first on the largest generators: residential estates, shopping centres, hotels and food businesses. Starting with high volume generators is sound practice. They produce concentrated, relatively predictable streams, they have staff who can be trained, and their compliance is easy to verify.

The honest reading of the August figures is that the gate has done its work and the network now has to catch up. A tonne diverted from the landfill is only diverted if it is actually composted, digested or recycled somewhere. Until TPS 3R coverage is citywide, part of the reduction rests on household level composting and on informal absorption that is not yet measured.

Sirkularium's view for government and public institutions

Three observations for local governments approaching the same transition.

First, on policy design. Makassar's result suggests that the binding constraint on landfill diversion is often enforcement geometry rather than public willingness. One inspection point, applied consistently to every load, changed the composition of an entire city's waste stream in under a month. Local governments drafting their own open dumping exit should identify their equivalent single control point before drafting anything else.

Second, on the transition for informal workers. This is the element most likely to determine whether the gain holds. Where recyclable value moves upstream, the recovery workforce needs a defined place upstream, through waste bank employment, TPS 3R operation, composting and maggot units, or contracted collection. The offtake commitment from a central waste bank is the practical bridge, because it guarantees a buyer for what the workforce produces. Pairing that with the national social protection scheme gives a household both income and cover.

Third, on measurement. Makassar's baseline is reported inconsistently, at 700 to 800 tonnes a day in one account and about 1,000 in another. That ambiguity will complicate any later claim about how much was diverted. Cities beginning this transition should fix and publish a baseline before the rule takes effect, ideally a weighbridge series rather than an estimate, so the result can be defended.

What to watch next: whether the 200 to 300 tonne figure holds once the three month socialisation period ends and novelty gives way to routine, the pace of TPS 3R construction across the remaining subdistricts, the composition audits that will show whether organic material is being processed or simply diverted out of sight, and the terms on which the workforce at TPA Tamangapa is brought into the new arrangement.

Makassar has produced something the national debate has been short of, which is evidence at city scale. Sirkularium will continue following how the city consolidates it.