From pilot to blueprint: building a sustainable, end-to-end waste system in East Java

Every year, Indonesia produces 3.2 million tonnes of unmanaged plastic waste, according to the United Nations, and more than one-third of it ends up in the ocean. Ensuring that this waste does not enter the environment while also extracting value from it requires an end-to-end waste management infrastructure supported by economically sustainable business models.

The Alliance has developed an integrated waste management project in the Malang Regency in East Java and is currently running a pilot to test it. The pilot addresses interconnected gaps simultaneously. It incorporates behaviour change campaigns to encourage household collection and waste segregation at source, as well as upgraded waste infrastructure, enhanced sorting capacity, and strengthened linkages with local recyclers to support established governance structures to manage waste management operations.

The pilot project was launched on 17 March 2025, covering four villages. By December 2025, it had expanded to eight additional villages, reaching 4,745 households, or about 25% of the community.

The Alliance is providing technical support to the project, as well as funding for infrastructure development and equipment, such as bins and waste collection vehicles. The regency government, in turn, provides the land for construction, the workforce to operate the system, and covers the system’s operating costs.

Plastic typically accounts for 15 to 20% of the regency’s municipal solid waste. To boost overall wastecollection, the Alliance has provided the Malang Regency with 24 tricycles, twopickup trucks, one armroll truck with two additional residue containers, onewheel loader, 18,000 household waste bins, 400 non-household waste bins, and 32wheelie bins. Personal protective equipment has also been provided to all wasteworkers.

A mini–Material Recovery Facility (MRF) has also been commissioned to help sort and process waste. Once fully operational, the MRF is expected to process up to 13 tonnes of waste per day. Oncesorted, the recyclable plastic, along with other recyclable materials, is soldto local recyclers, generating revenue to support and sustain the MRF and thewaste management system.

Waste from thousands of households is now regularly collected, sorted, and channelled for recycling and recovery. Materials that previously would have been lost to the environment are now managed through an efficient local system.

An official public utility body, the Badan Layanan Umum Daerah (BLUD), has been established to operate waste services, collect fees, manage revenues and reinvest into operations, ensuring the system is sustainable and can continue to function beyond the initial project phase.

Malang Regency is a candidate of Indonesia's Solid Waste Management for Sustainable Urban Development (SWM-SUD) initiative. Supported by US$150 million in loanfrom the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), this initiative aims tostrengthen end-to-end waste management systems in selected regencies.

The Malang pilot demonstrates how source separation, collection, sorting, recycling partnerships, and a model forfinancing ongoing operations can be integrated into a single waste managementsystem. The approach is intended to provide a blueprint for other cities andregions in Indonesia, with potential expansion across a broader area of MalangRegency and subsequently to up to 10 additional locations, with the aim ofserving up to 1.6 million households.

By addressing gaps across the entire waste management chain, the Alliance is testing an approach that can beadapted and replicated to help more communities move away from dumping andburning towards systems that collect, manage, and recover value from waste.