Environment ministry puts food waste first for districts as landfill methane measurement moves into policy

A conference that told districts where to start

On Tuesday 22 September 2026, the MERIT Conference 2026 was held in Jakarta, bringing together the Ministry of Environment, civil society organisations and regional government practitioners around a subject that rarely gets its own venue, which is the measurement and reduction of methane from waste. MERIT stands for Methane Emissions Reduction Initiative for Transparency.

The clearest instruction of the day came from Andina Novita Tas'an, coordinator of the working group on final processing sites, sanitary landfill and greenhouse gas emission reduction at the Ministry of Environment. Her message to districts and cities was a sequencing instruction rather than a new target. The responsibility of a regional government is to complete waste management, she said, and the waste that has to be resolved first is food waste.

She was equally specific about method. Food waste should be handled as close to its source as possible, including processing by households themselves, using approaches suited to local conditions. Composting and neighbourhood compost houses were named as workable answers. Only after food waste is under control, she said, should a region settle on the processing technology that best fits its own characteristics and waste composition in order to minimise emissions.

The instruction is a sequence, not a slogan. Sort out the wet fraction close to where it is generated, then choose the technology for everything else. Choosing the technology first is how a region ends up with an expensive plant fed by material that never needed to travel.

Why food waste is the fraction that decides everything else

The national numbers explain the priority. Data from the national waste management information system, SIPSN, recorded total waste generation of 32.8 million tonnes across 303 districts and cities in 2024. Food waste accounted for 39.87 percent of that, close to 20 million tonnes. Plastic followed at 19.54 percent, wood and branches at 12.7 percent, and paper and cardboard at 11.09 percent. When the ASEAN and Korea methane programme assessed Indonesian landfills in May 2026, it put the organic share of landfilled material at 63 percent.

Food waste is the fraction that determines the performance of almost everything downstream. It is the heaviest, so it drives haulage cost. It is the wettest, so it lowers the calorific value of any refuse derived fuel or thermal process it contaminates. It is the most biodegradable, so it is the source of landfill methane and of the leachate that has to be captured and treated. It is also the fraction most easily dealt with near the source, since composting requires no grid connection, no offtake contract and no import licence.

That last point is what makes the ministry's sequencing practical rather than aspirational. A regency that diverts its food waste to neighbourhood composting reduces tonnage, improves the quality of what remains, cuts its own methane generation and lowers its haulage bill, in one intervention that can start at the scale of a single neighbourhood unit.

Measurement moves from a project into a system

The second theme of the conference was measurement. Tiza Mafira, executive director of Dietplastik Indonesia, argued that methane measurement needs to become part of the waste management system itself and of national climate mitigation policy, rather than sitting alongside them as a separate exercise. She framed the direction of travel in a single line, from measurement to mitigation, from data to policy, from projects to systems.

Her organisation has been building the evidence base for that shift. The MERIT project is run by Dietplastik Indonesia together with Yaksa Pelestari Bumi Berkelanjutan (YPBB) Bandung and the environmental education centre PPLH Bali, with support from the Ministry of Environment and the Global Methane Hub. It has measured methane at three landfills across three provinces, TPST Bantargebang in Jakarta, TPPAS Sarimukti in West Java and TPA Suwung in Bali, using IPCC Tier 2 methodology verified with closed flux chamber sampling. The project describes this as the first Indonesian effort to measure methane across landfills in three provinces on a consistent basis.

The policy paper the project issued sets out what follows from those measurements. It recommends reducing both the quantity and the organic content of what reaches a landfill, improving landfill operating practice, allocating waste management budgets under the existing ministry of home affairs decision Kepmendagri 900.1.15.5-3406 of 2024, treating credible methane monitoring as a precondition for any emission reduction project, and writing methane indicators into waste management policy decisions. Briefs went to the provincial governments of Jakarta, West Java, Bali and South Kalimantan, and to the Bogor city government.

David Sutasurya, director of YPBB Bandung, made a point that regional officials will find reassuring, which is that existing regulations can already accommodate the methodology without a region needing to issue new local rules. Siti Ainun, a waste management expert on the project, tied the two halves together, noting that baseline data should guide interventions that serve both waste management and climate mitigation. Didin Agustian, the project's air quality expert, explained the technical value of the work, that locally measured parameters from these three sites improve the accuracy of baseline emission calculations for other facilities, replacing default assumptions with Indonesian figures.

The financing and the diplomacy are already in place

None of this sits in isolation. In May 2026 Indonesia became the third ASEAN country, after Malaysia and the Philippines, to implement the ASEAN and Korea Cooperation for Methane Mitigation, a three year programme worth 20 million US dollars funded by the Republic of Korea through the ASEAN and Korea Cooperation Fund, under the Partnership for ASEAN and ROK Methane Action. The launch in Jakarta brought together Minister of Environment Moh Jumhur Hidayat, Korean Ambassador to ASEAN Lee Chul, ASEAN Deputy Secretary General for the Socio Cultural Community San Lwin, and Global Green Growth Institute Indonesia country representative Rowan Fraser.

The programme covers organic waste management, emissions monitoring systems, policy strengthening at regional and local level, the development of financially viable projects, and regional dialogue. It estimates Indonesian landfill methane at around 21 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, and it is aligned with the national medium term development plan for 2025 to 2029. Minister Jumhur Hidayat placed the sector where the ministry has consistently placed it, saying that waste management is not merely a sanitation matter but a pillar of climate action.

Landfills account for about 18 percent of global human caused methane emissions. Methane is short lived in the atmosphere compared with carbon dioxide, which means reductions show up quickly. That is precisely why waste has attracted climate finance that other sectors have found harder to access, and why a region able to measure its own baseline credibly is in a better position to attract it.

What a district can do with this next week

The practical value of the conference is that its recommendations require very little that a regional government does not already possess.

A district can begin separating food waste at source in a defined area, using neighbourhood units as the operating scale, and route it to a compost house rather than to a truck. It can allocate the budget for that under the existing Kepmendagri framework rather than waiting for a new instrument. It can record the tonnage diverted, which is the same number that supports both a waste performance report and a methane reduction claim. And it can ask for support in establishing a measured baseline at its own landfill, now that a tested Indonesian methodology exists and a funded regional programme is running.

A tonne of food waste composted near the household does three jobs at once. It reduces landfill methane, it improves the quality of the remaining stream for whatever processing comes next, and it removes a haulage cost that recurs every single day.

Sirkularium's view for government and public institutions

Sirkularium reads the MERIT Conference as a useful correction of emphasis at a moment when national attention is heavily focused on large processing facilities. Those facilities are necessary, and the current construction programme is welcome. But the ministry's sequencing is right. The wet organic fraction is the cheapest thing to address, the fastest to show results, and the one whose removal improves the performance of every downstream option.

Three points follow for regional governments. First, treat food waste as an infrastructure question rather than a behavioural campaign. Compost houses, collection rounds for separated organics and offtake for finished compost are assets and services that need budget lines, not posters. Second, establish a methane baseline at your landfill, because measurement is now the entry condition for climate finance, and the methodology and support to do it credibly exist. Third, connect the two, since the same diverted tonnage that improves a waste performance figure is also the evidence base for an emission reduction claim, and reporting it once for both purposes is simply good administration.

What to watch next is whether the MERIT methodology is adopted by regions beyond the three study provinces, how the ASEAN and Korea programme allocates its support across Indonesian districts during its three year term, and whether food waste diversion appears as a distinct, funded line in regional budgets for 2027 rather than being folded into general cleaning expenditure.