Infamous for their dark, filthy and shallow waters, Jakarta’s waterways might best represent the many urban woes the capital city faces, but an experimental device designed to prevent plastic waste reaching the oceans may also help with cleaning efforts in the city’s rivers and canals.

The Maritime and Investment Coordinating Ministry and Water Management Unit at the Jakarta Environment Agency are currently conducting a trial run of the waste-filtering device called the Interceptor 001 in the Cengkareng drainage canal in Pantai Indah Kapuk, North Jakarta.

The Interceptor has been developed by Dutch entrepreneur Boyan Slat through his nonprofit organization The Ocean Cleanup in collaboration with Danone-AQUA Indonesia, which has provided the maintenance and research support for the device.

The 13-meter-long and 7-m-wide Interceptor is stationed near the mouth of Cengkareng drainage canal to receive drifting debris and waste channeled through 50-m barriers on one riverbank into the device.

Powered by solar panels, it can lift the collected waste on a conveyor belt and then dump it into one of six dumpsters with a total capacity of 50 cubic meters.

Local workers then take the collected waste to a dumpsite near Penjaringan before finally ending up at Bantargebang landfill in Bekasi, West Java.

Slat said the Interceptor was designed to intercept plastic waste in rivers before it reached the ocean, as The Ocean Cleanup found that about out 80 percent of plastic waste in the sea came from the 1,000 most polluting rivers in the world, 83 of which are located in Indonesia.

According to the Jakarta Environment Agency, Jakarta produces 7,500 tons of waste daily, which is brought to Bantargebang, 250 tons of which are scooped out daily from rivers. Meanwhile, plastics make up around 1,900 to 2,400 tons of the waste.

An audit by Break Free of Plastics collected a total of 13,309 pieces of plastic waste in Indonesia, 6,289 pieces of which were unbranded but the rest came from big local and international brands.

Most of the plastic waste found in Indonesia is made from polyethylene terephthalate (PET), commonly used for plastic bottles, and low density polyethylene (LDPE), commonly used for bottle lids and shopping bags.

Slat said the first generation of the Interceptor had been up and running since the beginning of this year in Jakarta. Another version has also been operating in the Klang River in Selangor, Malaysia.

“Jakarta is a great test site because on one hand there’s a lot of plastics going into rivers and on the other hand we have received a lot of support and interest from local government, national government and local businesses to participate,” Slat told reporters on Thursday during a media visit to the device in the Cengkareng drainage canal.

“We only deployed this in the spring, we haven’t really seen it in the rainy season yet so that’s something that we hope to see in the coming months,” he said, referring to the first implementation of the device in May.

Although the majority of plastic waste is collected, the device is not yet able to separate plastic from other kinds of waste, he said.

The Ocean Cleanup has conducted its research and project to clean rivers since 2015, and in Indonesia, Danone Aqua began research cooperation with the group in 2018 to look into plastics waste management, which resulted in the Interceptor 001 device.

“We are happy to have been able to cooperate with The Ocean Cleanup to operate the first system to not only prevent plastic waste entering the sea, but also help in cleaning up rivers,” Danone Indonesia president director Corine Tap said on Thursday.

The ongoing research by Danone Indonesia and The Ocean Cleanup found that the device can reduce by 60 percent the amount of waste that goes into the sea from rivers. The device can also retrieve up to 1.8 tons of waste, 466 kilograms of which are plastics, if left operating for 24 hours.

Tap said that preventing plastic waste from entering the sea from rivers was an important part of waste management in Indonesia, so Danone also cooperated with the government, trash-collector communities, waste banks and others to collect 12,000 tons of waste every day with six recycling business units developed by Danone with its local partners to process it into new materials for bottles.

Sustainable development director of Danone Indonesia Karyanto Wibowo said the equipment used in the Cengkareng Canal was still a prototype and it was still in the testing phase of the research period.

“If the Indonesian government intends to replicate this system, there is a possibility of implementing a public-private partnership as the business model for the operation of this technology in the near future,” Karyanto told The Jakarta Post on Friday.

Nani Hendiarti, Maritime and Investment Coordinating Ministry assistant deputy of knowledge and technology application said that according to the 2018 Presidential Decree on marine waste mitigation, Indonesia aimed to reduce plastics in the sea by up to 70 percent in 2025.

Nani said the coordinating ministry had set up a team to evaluate how the device would be used in many rivers in country, not just in Jakarta.

“We are still waiting for the research to finish until the peak of the rainy season. We are currently in the transition season and during the dry season there hasn’t been a challenge [for the device],” Nani said.

North Jakarta Water Agency head Lambas Sigalingging said the administration had been providing manpower to support the device to work well and would continue to use it until December this year before the evaluation.

However, the Jakarta Administration has yet to decide whether it will continue using the device in the future or procure the device for itself. “We are still in the experimental phase. First, we will see how effective the device is in helping to clean up rivers,” Lambas said.

However, workers on site said that the device had yet to be of much help to them in their day-to-day job of cleaning up rivers and waterways, especially the Cengkareng drainage canal.

Nikolas, who leads a team of 50 workers in Penjaringan said the device did not scoop up a lot of debris. “This canal is about 65 meters wide while the device has only about a 1-meter-wide mouth [to scoop up waste] so during heavy rain there could be large items of debris such as bamboos or parts of trees that will not be able to enter. We have to get them out by ourselves,” Nikolas told the Post.

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