PT Timah has returned 3,575.8 hectares across Bangka Belitung, and the open question is what that restored land is now worth

PT Timah set out its reclamation record for Bangka Belitung in figures published on 13 September 2026. Between 2015 and 2025 the company returned 3,575.8 hectares of former tin mining land. The distribution across the province is specific: 916.35 hectares in Bangka Regency, 823.80 hectares across cross-regency areas, 659.01 hectares in East Belitung, 514.23 hectares in West Bangka, 269.33 hectares in Belitung, 224.31 hectares in Central Bangka, and 168.75 hectares in South Bangka.

The recent run is steady rather than dramatic. The company reclaimed 354.05 hectares during 2025, and 78.21 hectares in the first half of 2026. For 2026 as a whole it has submitted a plan covering 411.16 hectares across six regencies and cross-regency areas.

The work itself is described in familiar terms: land regrading, topsoil management, revegetation using fast growing and productive species alongside local varieties, river restoration, mangrove planting, and biodiversity conservation. Marine work runs in parallel, including artificial reef deployment.

A number that is well kept

Sirkularium has argued repeatedly through this year that Indonesia measures the revenue side of mining in detail and the environmental side hardly at all. This is the case where that generalisation needs qualifying.

Reclaimed hectares are counted. They are counted by company, by regency, by year, and against an annual plan submitted in advance. Reclamation is a permit condition, a reclamation guarantee fund sits behind it, and the figures are reported publicly enough that a decade of them can be laid out in a table. On area, the record keeping works.

What is missing is the next column. The hectare count tells you how much land has been treated. It does not tell you what that land now does.

Two reclaimed hectares can carry the same entry in the ledger and produce entirely different things. One may be supporting a functioning water catchment and a productive smallholding. The other may be a slope of fast growing trees on compacted spoil with no soil profile worth the name.

Anggi Siahaan, Department Head of Corporate Communication at PT Timah, pointed at exactly the right distinction. Reclamation, he said, is not merely a regulatory obligation. The company works toward restoring post-mining land to function as green space or productive area benefiting communities, and encourages reclaimed land to deliver ecological benefit together with economic value for the surrounding population.

Ecological benefit together with economic value is a valuation statement. It is also, at present, an aspiration without a measurement attached.

What a hectare could be shown to be worth

The methodology for closing that gap already exists in Indonesian regulation and has been demonstrated in practice this year.

Permen LH No. 15 Tahun 2012 sets out how to value a forest ecosystem, covering direct benefits, indirect services, existence value, and option and bequest values. Applied in Morowali with GIS spatial overlay and market and benefit transfer methods, it produced a total economic value for that district's forest of Rp2.81 trillion a year, a figure exceeding the district's own annual revenue. The same guideline can be applied to restored land. Permen LH No. 7 Tahun 2014 covers the other direction, pricing ecological damage and recovery cost, and courts have used it to reach concrete judgments.

Tin reclamation in Bangka Belitung is unusually well suited to this treatment. The province's mined landscape is dominated by tailing sands and former pit lakes, where the relevant questions are measurable and locally consequential: has soil organic matter recovered, does the water body support fisheries, has salinity or acidity moved, is the vegetation self sustaining without replanting, and is the land producing income for anyone. Remote sensing gives canopy cover and water extent on a repeatable schedule. Ground sampling gives the soil and water chemistry. Neither is expensive at this scale.

A company that has treated 3,575.8 hectares over a decade has, in effect, ten years of field trials. The data to say which reclamation approaches produced lasting value and which did not is largely already in the ground.

Why this matters beyond one company

Indonesia is in the middle of a broad effort to price its resource economy accurately. Benchmark price formulas were rebuilt this year. Production quotas were tied to royalty contribution. An export single window now reconciles declared value against customs and counterparty data. A national commodities exchange is due to open in January to establish a domestic reference price. Non-tax revenue from nickel doubled while ore production fell by close to half, which is the clearest evidence yet that measuring value properly changes outcomes.

Post-mining land is the asset that programme has not yet reached. It is held against reclamation guarantee funds calculated on cost, not on the value of the resulting land, and Indonesia has been developing a national reclamation cost standard to improve that calculation. Cost is the right basis for a guarantee. It is the wrong basis for knowing whether the work succeeded.

Sirkularium's view

PT Timah's record here is a real one and the disclosure is more detailed than most. A decade of hectares broken out by regency, with a forward plan, is a solid foundation. Three observations for government and public institutions.

First, the reporting standard should extend from area to condition. Requiring a small, fixed set of condition indicators alongside the hectare count, such as canopy cover, soil organic carbon, water quality, and whether the land is in productive use, would cost little and would turn a compliance return into evidence. Companies already visit these sites.

Second, reclamation guarantee adequacy should be tested against measured outcomes each year rather than assessed at closure. If restored hectares can be shown to reach a defined condition, the guarantee has done its job. If they cannot, that is information the regulator needs long before a mine closes.

Third, Bangka Belitung is the natural place to establish the method. The province has a long tin history, a large stock of reclaimed land across seven regencies, an active formalisation effort for community mining, and a state company reporting its figures publicly. A district level valuation of reclaimed land there, conducted under Permen LH No. 15 Tahun 2012 with GIS and ground data, would give Indonesia its first defensible answer to what post-mining land is worth once restored.

For operators, the argument is straightforward and in their favour. A company that can show its reclaimed hectares reached a measured condition has converted an expense into a demonstrable asset, and holds evidence the Ministry of Environment and Forestry can accept at face value. Hectares alone prove effort. Condition proves result, and only one of those is a defence.

What to watch next is whether the 411.16 hectare plan for 2026 is met, whether condition indicators begin appearing alongside area figures in company reporting, and whether the national reclamation cost standard moves toward valuing outcomes rather than pricing inputs.