Palembang cleans the Musi, and argues that cleaning is not the answer

Seven hundred people on the riverbank

On Saturday 12 September 2026, around 700 people gathered on the bank of the Musi at 7 Ulu, in Kelurahan 9/10 Ulu, Jakabaring district, within sight of the Ampera Bridge. Mayor Ratu Dewa led the action himself. The participants were volunteers, community groups, students, young people, residents and government staff.

The activity belongs to a programme called Gerakan Menjaga Sungai Palembang, the movement to look after Palembang's river, run by the city government with the Indonesia Creative Cities Network in South Sumatra through its Guardians of The River initiative. Muhammad Hafidz Alfuqan coordinates the network regionally.

Joining them was Benedict Wermter, a German environmental campaigner known in Indonesia as Bule Sampah. What came out of the river was plastic, household refuse, textiles including discarded clothing and sarongs caught along the banks, and mud.

The numbers behind the river

Palembang generates about 1,260 tonnes of waste a day, which works out at more than 460,000 tonnes a year.

The city has substantial processing capacity in place. Its waste to energy plant at Keramasan is built for 1,000 tonnes a day, and the city began sending waste to it earlier this month.

Set the two figures side by side and the arithmetic explains the riverbank. Even with a major facility running at full design capacity, the city generates more than that facility can take. Everything above the line has to be reduced at source, recovered, or it ends up somewhere unmanaged. In a city built along a river, some of it ends up in the river.

Ratu Dewa made that point directly rather than leaving it implied.

Waste reduction and sorting still have to start at home, in the neighbourhood and in the community.

He asked residents not to dump waste carelessly and to treat caring for the environment as a habit rather than an occasional effort.

Why a cleanup is a communication exercise

The most useful thing about this event is that the people running it said out loud what such events usually leave unsaid.

Wermter's contribution was to state the limit of the activity he had travelled to join: cleaning matters, but cleaning is not the solution, and the solution is managing waste properly. Alfuqan made the complementary point about consistency, arguing that the movement should not stop at a single activity but has to keep going.

Seven hundred people working a riverbank for a morning remove a quantity of material that is small against 1,260 tonnes a day. Judged as waste management, a cleanup is close to irrelevant. Judged as a communication exercise, it can be effective, because it puts several hundred residents in direct physical contact with what the city's waste actually becomes, and it gives a mayor a credible platform from which to ask for household separation.

The risk with cleanups is the opposite outcome: they can substitute for policy, allowing a city to demonstrate visible activity without changing the system that fills the river. Palembang's framing, with both the mayor and the guest campaigner pointing past the event toward source separation, is the framing that avoids that trap.

The gap the plant does not close

For government readers, the operational question in Palembang is what happens to the volume above the Keramasan plant's capacity.

A waste to energy facility rated at 1,000 tonnes a day in a city producing 1,260 leaves a residual gap that has to be met through household separation, waste banks, organic processing at neighbourhood level and commercial and market stream separation. Those are precisely the measures the mayor was advocating on the riverbank.

There is also a quality dimension. A thermal plant performs best on a consistent, reasonably dry feedstock. Wet organic material lowers calorific value and raises operating costs. So source separation does not only close the volume gap, it improves the economics of the facility the city has already paid for. The upstream work and the downstream asset are not alternatives, they are complements, and that is an argument worth making in a budget meeting.

The material pulled from the water carries its own signal. Alongside plastic and household refuse, volunteers recovered textiles, including discarded clothing and sarongs. Textiles are one of the five priority sectors in Indonesia's circular economy roadmap and one of the least served by existing collection systems. Almost no Indonesian city offers a household route for unwanted clothing, so it moves into the general stream or into a watercourse. A city finding sarongs in its river is seeing a collection gap rather than only a behavioural one, and that gap is cheap to close through periodic textile collection points at markets or places of worship.

River cities carry a particular version of this problem. A watercourse running through a dense settlement offers a disposal route that is free, immediate and requires no service. No collection system competes on convenience. That is why enforcement alone rarely works on riverside dumping, and why the practical answer is reliable collection close enough to the household that it beats the river on convenience.

Sirkularium's view for government and public institutions

Three observations.

First, on how to use a cleanup. Cleanups are worth running when they are explicitly framed as recruitment for a source separation programme, with a named next step participants can join. Cities should pair every cleanup with a sign up: a waste bank to register with, a neighbourhood collection schedule to follow, a school programme to enrol in. Without that, the morning's goodwill disperses with the volunteers.

Second, on sizing expectations around a major facility. Palembang's position, with a 1,000 tonne plant against 1,260 tonnes of generation, is common and instructive. A large facility changes what a city can handle but does not by itself close the gap, and it performs better when fed separated material. Local governments commissioning a plant should publish the residual gap alongside the capacity figure, so the continuing need for upstream work is visible from the start rather than arriving as a surprise.

Third, on riverside collection. Where dumping into a watercourse is established practice, the effective intervention is usually service reliability rather than sanction. We would encourage cities on major rivers to map collection frequency and walking distance along the riverbank specifically, and to close the gaps there first, because those are the streets where the alternative disposal route is most convenient.

What to watch next: whether the river care movement produces a repeating schedule rather than remaining an event, the tonnage the Keramasan plant actually receives now that deliveries have started, and whether Palembang publishes a household separation participation figure it can track over time.

The city put 700 people on the riverbank and used the platform to argue for something other than more cleanups. Sirkularium will continue following what follows the sacks.