Minister's East Java tour highlights a national model for waste management

A minister's field visit builds the case for a national model

On Wednesday, 15 July 2026, Indonesia's Minister of Environment, Mohammad Jumhur Hidayat, spent the day moving through East Java rather than sitting in Jakarta. His itinerary took him from the Green and Smart Port Initiatives ASRI facility at Dermaga C of Petrokimia Gresik Port, to a food-security and environmental education programme at SMA Negeri 1 Gresik, and finally to a refuse-derived-fuel operation in Banjardowo Village, Jombang Regency. By the end of the day he had delivered a clear verdict: East Java, he said, is the country's top-performing province in environmental management and waste handling, and other regions should look to it as a reference point.

That is a notable statement from a minister only months into the job. Jumhur Hidayat was appointed Minister of Environment in April 2026, succeeding Hanif Faisol Nurofiq, and has set a target of resolving Indonesia's waste management problem within one to two years across the country's districts and cities. His East Java tour was as much about identifying a replicable model as it was about recognising past performance.

The numbers behind the ranking

The minister's assessment draws on 2026 data from the National Waste Management Information System (SIPSN), which the Ministry of Environment uses as its evaluation baseline. East Java generates approximately 12,314 tonnes of waste per day, more than eight million tonnes annually, making it one of the largest waste-generating provinces in the country. Despite that volume, the province has achieved an 11 percent reduction in waste reaching final disposal sites through source sorting and community waste banks.

That performance was formally recognised earlier in the year. At the 2026 National Waste Management Coordination Meeting held on 25 February at Balai Kartini, Jakarta, East Java Governor Khofifah Indar Parawansa received the Best Facilitator award in the province category, presented by then-Minister of Environment Hanif Faisol Nurofiq. East Java collected 13 of the 35 certificates awarded nationally that day, more than any other province: one Best City certificate, awarded to Surabaya, and 12 Towards Clean City certificates spread across the city of Malang and the regency of Malang, plus Sidoarjo, Gresik, Madiun, Jombang, Situbondo, Magetan, Pamekasan, Probolinggo, Lumajang and Blitar. Surabaya's score of 74.92 placed it ahead of Ciamis in West Java at 74.68 and Balikpapan in East Kalimantan at 74.55, the two next-highest scores nationally. The interactive breakdown below lists all 13 recipients by award tier.

"Jawa Timur menjadi peringkat satu dalam penilaian kami terkait pengelolaan lingkungan dan penanganan sampah," Minister Jumhur Hidayat said during the July visit, adding that the province can serve as an example for regions that remain less committed to the issue.

Jombang's refuse-derived-fuel model

The most concrete element of the July tour was the minister's stop in Banjardowo Village, where Jombang Regency operates a circular-economy waste processing scheme built around refuse-derived fuel, or RDF. Deputy Regent M. Salmanudin Yazid told the minister that of the roughly 500 tonnes of waste generated daily in the regency, around 300 tonnes, about 70 percent, is now successfully processed rather than sent to landfill.

The mechanism, according to the minister, is straightforward but disciplined: waste is sorted by type at the source, then routed through a series of processing steps so that only a small residual fraction ends up at the final disposal site. The processed inorganic fraction is converted into RDF, a solid fuel substitute that the minister noted directly displaces coal use in industrial applications.

"Ini sangat ramah lingkungan karena mengurangi penggunaan bahan bakar batu bara," the minister said of the Jombang facility, describing it as already meeting good waste management standards.

The Ministry indicated it will study the Jombang approach in more depth as a candidate for national scaling, including the economic feasibility of expanding capacity and structuring inter-regional cooperation agreements so that neighbouring districts could feed waste into shared processing infrastructure. The minister framed the appeal of the model in economic as well as environmental terms: a circular-economy approach that generates revenue from processed materials can sustain itself at scale without depending indefinitely on government subsidy, while also creating jobs in the green waste sector.

Education and industry reinforce the picture

The minister's stop at SMA Negeri 1 Gresik added a third dimension to the day. The school holds the Adiwiyata Mandiri designation, the highest tier of Indonesia's national school environmental education programme, and the visit reviewed both that certification and a food-security initiative run alongside it. Governor Khofifah, who accompanied the minister at this stop, described East Java's ambition for the school's produce-processing work to become a pilot project whose output is eventually developed into higher-value processed goods.

Earlier the same day, the minister's inspection of the Green and Smart Port Initiatives ASRI programme at Petrokimia Gresik Port extended the province's environmental performance story beyond municipal waste and into industrial and logistics infrastructure, suggesting a more integrated approach across sectors rather than waste management treated in isolation.

Why it matters

Indonesia's waste sector has spent much of 2026 under pressure to demonstrate that ambitious national targets, including the phase-out of open dumping, can translate into working systems on the ground. Against that backdrop, a province that generates over 12,000 tonnes of waste daily and still posts double-digit reduction rates, a district processing 70 percent of its waste through source sorting and RDF conversion, and a school system embedding environmental practice into its curriculum together offer a more complete picture than any single project announcement. The fact that a sitting minister chose to spend a full working day moving between a port, a school and a village-level facility signals that the government intends to treat these as replicable components rather than isolated success stories.

Sirkularium's view

For government and public institutions elsewhere in Indonesia, the East Java case offers a useful template precisely because it is not a single large capital project but a combination of governance choices: consistent source sorting, waste bank infrastructure, a processing facility sized to a manageable regency-level volume, and sustained attention from provincial leadership over multiple years. None of these elements individually requires the scale of investment associated with waste-to-energy plants, which makes the model more immediately transferable to regencies and cities with smaller budgets.

The Ministry's stated intent to study Jombang's economics for national replication is worth watching closely. If the feasibility work confirms that RDF processing at this scale can operate without ongoing subsidy, and if inter-regional cooperation agreements can be structured to let smaller districts share processing capacity, this could become one of the more scalable near-term components of Indonesia's circular economy transition, complementing rather than competing with the larger waste-to-energy investments already underway elsewhere in the country. Public institutions considering their own waste strategies would do well to look first at source sorting and waste bank coverage, the two levers behind East Java's reduction numbers, before assuming that new infrastructure alone is the answer.