Coordinating minister seeks presidential decree to clear Indonesia's waste mountains

What Zulkifli Hasan told Wonosobo

On Sunday, 12 July 2026, Zulkifli Hasan, Indonesia's Coordinating Minister for Food Affairs, addressed a civil society dialogue in Wonosobo Regency, Central Java, titled "Untuk Ketahanan Pangan dan Kelestarian Lingkungan" (For Food Security and Environmental Sustainability). Waste management dominated his remarks. He told the audience the government intends to resolve the country's largest waste piles in stages, with roughly half of the problem cleared by 2027 and the remainder by 2028. The government's priority list covers 24 of 40 large cities identified as the main focus, led by Jakarta, Surabaya, Bandung, and Tangerang, with Palembang and Medan singled out for earlier completion in 2027.

The most consequential line in his remarks was not a date but a request. Hasan said he has asked President Prabowo Subianto to issue a Keppres, a presidential decree, that would formally grant his coordinating ministry the authority to direct waste and environmental management efforts across the agencies that currently share responsibility for the sector, including the Ministry of Environment. That is a notable institutional move: waste policy in Indonesia has traditionally sat with the Ministry of Environment, and a decree elevating cross-agency coordination to the Coordinating Ministry for Food Affairs would mark a shift in how the government organizes its response to a problem it has struggled to solve for decades.

The numbers behind the target

The priority cities Hasan named share one defining feature: each hosts at least one final processing site, or TPA, handling more than 1,000 tonnes of waste daily. Jakarta's Bantargebang and Jatiwaringin sites, along with landfill sites in Bali, were named specifically as the kind of large-scale accumulation the 2027-2028 timeline is meant to address. Hasan put the target plainly.

"By 2027, about 50 percent of the target will be achieved, and we will complete the remaining 50 percent in 2028."

That two-stage structure gives regional governments a concrete planning horizon, but the reporting from Wonosobo does not specify a facility-by-facility breakdown of which sites fall into the 2027 tranche versus the 2028 tranche, beyond the six cities named. Nor does it detail how progress against the 50 percent marker will be measured or independently verified.

Why a food minister is driving waste policy

Hasan's waste portfolio did not begin in Wonosobo. Speaking in Jakarta's Rasuna Said area on 10 May 2026 at the launch of a waste-sorting movement, he described the origin of his mandate: President Prabowo, he said, had personally pressed him to fix a problem that had defeated eleven years of prior policy attempts.

"Waste has become a deep concern for the President. There is waste everywhere, and the President is troubled that a nation aiming to be great and advanced still cannot manage its own waste."

At that May event, Hasan cited Presidential Regulation No. 109 of 2025, which he said was issued specifically to cut through Indonesia's slow permitting process for waste infrastructure, and referenced an even larger scope at the time: 71 cities across 22 agglomeration zones facing what he called waste emergencies. The Wonosobo figures of 40 priority cities and 24 in the first phase describe a narrower, later-stage subset of that broader emergency list, though neither the ministry nor the reporting so far has published a table reconciling the two counts. Institutions tracking this program should treat the city and agglomeration figures as evolving rather than fixed, since they have shifted across at least three public statements in as many months.

A track record that explains the urgency

The case for elevating coordination authority rests on a track record of stalled permitting. According to Hasan, only two waste-management projects using advanced processing technology received permits in the eleven years before the current reform drive, and of those two, only one has operated, and only intermittently. Since deregulation began, the ministry says 70 cities have started developing waste management systems and 35 regulations have been revised during the first year and a half of the Prabowo administration.

Waste-to-energy infrastructure is the centerpiece of the technology push. At the 8 July 2026 groundbreaking of Bali's Denpasar Raya waste-to-energy plant, Hasan described the broader program in blunt terms.

"The PSEL facilities being launched, across 34 agglomerations, will only resolve 22.5 percent of the problem."

He said the remaining 77.5 percent of Indonesia's waste burden would need to be addressed through simpler, lower-cost technologies rather than incineration-based power plants, an acknowledgment that waste-to-energy alone cannot carry the national target. That framing matters for the 2027-2028 timeline: clearing the priority TPAs named in Wonosobo will depend heavily on non-PSEL methods, including composting, sorting, and material recovery, at a scale the ministry has not yet detailed publicly.

What remains unresolved

Several open questions will determine whether the Wonosobo announcement becomes a durable governance shift or another restated ambition. The Keppres itself had not been issued as of this writing, and neither the date of a possible signing nor its precise scope, whether it grants Hasan's office binding authority over other ministries or a lighter coordinating role, has been made public. The relationship between this initiative and the Ministry of Environment's own 2027 deadline to end open dumping at the country's 485 landfills, announced separately by Environment Minister Jumhur Hidayat days earlier, is also not yet clarified in the reporting, despite both efforts sharing the same 2027-2028 horizon and overlapping landfill sites. Whether the two tracks will be merged under the requested decree, run in parallel, or eventually compete for the same budget and staff is a question provincial and municipal governments will want answered before committing planning resources to either one.

Sirkularium's view

For government and public institutions, the Wonosobo announcement is less significant for its 2027-2028 dates, which echo targets the ministry has floated before, than for the institutional request underneath it. A Keppres granting a Coordinating Ministry authority over waste and environmental management would be a structural change to how Indonesia governs a cross-cutting problem that habitually stalls at the boundary between agencies. The track record Hasan himself cited, two permits in eleven years, is itself the argument for why a coordinating authority might succeed where sector-specific mandates have not.

Institutions advising regional governments should treat the shifting city and agglomeration counts, 71 cities in May, 34 agglomerations in July, 40 priority cities and 24 in phase one in Wonosobo, as a signal that the program's scope is still being defined rather than finalized. The more durable planning question is not which count is current, but whether the requested decree, once issued, clarifies who is accountable for the 1,000-tonne-per-day sites that have accumulated for over a decade, and whether that authority is matched with a financing and verification mechanism the ministry has yet to describe. Until the Keppres is signed and its scope published, the safest posture for provincial and district governments is to keep building the collection, sorting, and processing capacity that any version of the plan will require, rather than waiting for the coordination question to be settled in Jakarta.