Hidden treasure: South Jakarta’s business strip hides informal waste business which is part of the plastic recycling industry.

On a hot, humid day, a cup of water becomes our savior. But as soon as that cup is emptied — the speed depending on how thirsty you are — it gets tossed away, with little thought for what happens next.

But imagine if a plastic cup could share its journey …

Ouch! Whoa, what’s going on? Five minutes ago I was in a cooler box and now I’m in a waste bin alongside who knows what. Well, I guess I’m luckier than most to have ended up here. Others are simply thrown on the sidewalk, to be stepped on by passersby or flattened by vehicles.

The journey that one single discarded plastic cup — or anything plastic — makes from the moment it is tossed away is not a short one. It’s more of a cycle, involving a number of players along the way, as the formal and informal sectors of the country’s recycling industry try to make a profit out of dealing with used plastic.

And they have a lot of it to deal with.

Around 3.8 million tons of plastic products are manufactured each year, and only 2.1 million tons of raw material virgin polymer pellets are produced locally.

As the amount of additional imported raw materials fluctuates along with the foreign exchange rate and global oil price, recycled plastic products make up the shortfall.

As domestic waste sorting — into organic, glass, paper and plastic waste — has yet to become common practice among Indonesians, the informal sector still plays a significant role in making recycling happen. These entrepreneurs and workers — among them trash pickers, waste sorters and middlemen bosses — form the longest chain in the industry.

One of those on the frontline is 33-year-old Moh. Darmadi. A self-employed plastic-waste collector, he roams the streets and neighborhoods in South Jakarta’s Setiabudi equipped with a metal picker and a plastic sack on his back.

He heads out onto the streets each evening on the hunt for plastic treasure: bottles, cups and bags. He chooses to work the “night shift” as his territory is more crowded with street-side eateries, providing more things to collect in less time, he says.

“I used to work during the day, for three years here,” Darmadi says. “But then more people [trash collectors] arrived, so I shifted to later hours.”

What Darmadi collects he then sells to a nearby lapak — a term for businesses that buy waste material from trash collectors — in Karet Pedurenan. For a kilogram of plastic cups and bottles, he receives Rp 900; for plastic bags, he receives half that amount.

Darmadi is among the regular suppliers for the lapak run by 60-year old Sutoyo. Set up some 15 years ago, Sutoyo’s business receives around two dozen sacks filled with bottles and cups each day. Also in the waste he buys are bottle tops, empty shampoo bottles and a variety of other kinds of discarded plastic packaging.

His 13 workers, all of whom are his relatives from Central Java’s Tegal, sort the waste according to function and composition in two separate plots in the area, a vast vacant block of land tucked behind the skyscrapers in the Kuningan business strip.

Seventeen-year-old Sri Wahyuni uses a knife to peel labels off the colorless bottles and cups, once the plastic items have been sorted.

Workers such as Sri Wahyuni and Wahid Hasyim have become experts in what is what in the plastic world, after having lived and breathed it during their working lives.

“This type of gallon seal is the most expensive,” says Wahid, pointing to a seal. “It sells for Rp 4,500 a kilogram. They will be turned into seals again, while regular bottles and cups are usually made into yarn.”

Once a week, a truck comes and picks up the sacks of plastic and takes them to a plant in West Jakarta’s Cengkareng. Sumanto, owner of the plant, pays the lapak business Rp 10 million for a truck loaded with around 35 sacks of the waste.

“Bosses like Sumanto are the ones who set the price,” says Casmudi, manager of Sutoyo’s lapak. “Prices go up and down occasionally.”

In Sumanto’s plant, five workers re-sort the waste, flattening the bottles and cups, washing them, placing them in the sun to dry and then dumping the plastic into a Chinese-made crushing machine. A separate machine turns the stiffer colored kinds of plastics into pellets.

That’s as far as Sumanto’s business goes. Even with that relatively short process, his business books a minimum weekly turnover of Rp 45 million as he supplies some 9 tons of crushed plastics and pellets to a plastic factory in Bekasi — or even further afield.

“I used to supply crushed PP [polypropylene] to an exporter who sends it to China,” Sumanto says  
And so that plastic cup that you drank from and tossed away could eventually end up right back in your house, perhaps in your kitchenware, in your polyester clothes, in the hair on the head of your daughter’s doll.

The plastic recycling business is, like most industries, affected by the financial situation elsewhere in the world.

For plastic manufacturers, recycled materials serve only as fillers when price of the virgin polymer rises along with the price of oil. And when oil is cheaper, recycled pellets —especially the ones that have to be imported — fall off the list.

Sumanto experienced this effect not so long ago. So instead of exporting, he started supplying his plastic to a plant in Bekasi that produces plastic cookie jars. Meanwhile, the colored pellets he produces go to a neighboring factory in Kapuk Muara that produces brooms, baskets and crates.

Is that all there is to plastic recycling? From bottles and cups to jars, from shampoo packaging to brooms?

“Plastic products can be recycled over and over,” says Lies A. Wisojodharmo, a researcher at the Technology Research and Application Agency (BPPT). “However, the quality of the end product will decrease unless virgin polymers are injected into the process.”

Currently, Indonesia’s plastic recycling industry consists of the huge informal sector and some 60 registered manufacturers using recycled materials in Java. All of these follow the mechanical recycling process of crushing and pelletizing, which is a cheaper method than the chemical one that has developed in European countries.

Still, with that industry, only about half of the plastic waste produced annually is being recycled. While plastic accounts for 13.9 percent of the waste in Greater Jakarta, only 6.5 percent is recycled, according to a World Bank pilot project on waste identification.

Which means there’s still a lot of room for developing Indonesia’s plastic recycling industry — and that might need to happen from the very beginning of the process.

“If plastic waste can be sorted from the source, it will increase the quality of the recycled product,” Lies explains.

“Some producers using plastic packaging like Aqua have provided crushing machines to some recycling business run by NGOs. But there is no guarantee of the supply of plastic waste to be able to run effectively,” she adds.

One way to guarantee a more steady supply of sorted waste is to create waste banks as in Thailand. Households there are encouraged to sort their plastic waste and drop the piles off at several points like community units or vihara.

“If the government wants to extend producers’ responsibility for plastic waste recycling, they would do well to create and subsidize programs like waste banks,” Lies said.

“It will help a lot in making the plastic recycling industry more efficient.”

— Photos by Anissa Febrina

Indonesian annual production
of plastic materials
    
Application    Tons    %
Pipes, tubes and hoses    518,972    13.65
Floor covering    2,553    0.07
Plastic sheets & film    134,067    3.52
Plastic containers    591,385    15.57
Plastic bags & sacks    1,535,100    40.37
Plastic household items    593,401    15.60
Plastic stationery    18,693    0.49
Plastic for records    171,956    4.52
Disposable medical syringes    627    0.02
Plastic for engineering
purposes    235,371    6.19
TOTAL    3,802,725    100

Source: Industry Ministry

Popular

Volcano erupts in North Sulawesi, hundreds evacuated

Dubai roads, airport reel from floods after record rains

Ramadan boosts consumer confidence, retail sales