Indonesia is the fourth-most-populous nation on the earth and the second-biggest plastic polluter after China, producing 3.2 metric tons of plastic waste yearly. Many areas within the nation lack appropriate waste administration infrastructure, and about half of the trash is burned, inflicting carbon emissions and well being dangers. Many of the relaxation results in our bodies of water.
Household-run nonprofit Sungai Watch has been taking up the burden of cleansing up the plastic in Indonesia’s rivers so it doesn’t attain the ocean. It intercepts trash with buoyant boundaries, then collects and kinds it for recycling the place potential. In the present day, it’s launching a sister firm, Sungai Design, to upcycle a number of the hardest-to-recycle plastics into sturdy merchandise—beginning with a set of lounge chairs made out of plastic luggage.
[Photo: Sungai Design]
After relocating to Bali together with his household 20 years in the past, at age 7, French-born Sam Bencheghib began to note the overwhelming waste. Bali was “this lovely paradise that you simply see on postcards and on Instagram,” Bencheghib says. “However we’ve actually seen it get devastated with plastics.” Bencheghib, the youngest of three siblings, would clear up seashores together with his brother and sister. Nevertheless it proved comparatively ineffective, as a result of many of the plastics within the ocean move in from rivers.
In 2020, of their dad and mom’ storage, the siblings constructed a protracted, floating barrier, strung collectively by steel wire, with a steel grid beneath that extends underwater to gather particles. They positioned it in a river close to their residence to maintain trash from coming into the ocean. The subsequent day, they discovered it had collected 110 kilos of plastic.

[Photo: Sungai Design]
Three years later, they’ve 270 boundaries, custom-made for various river depths—and eight sorting facilities, the place workers members kind plastic into 30 totally different classes. They make use of what they name a “village mannequin”: In every polluted space, they’ve 15 to twenty boundaries, a sorting middle, and about 12 workers, forming a “self-sustaining cleanup operation for the area.” Thus far, the boundaries have collected 1,800 metric tons of plastic in whole.
Sungai is essentially funded via company sponsorships, whereby corporations can get their logos onto a barrier. Larger corporations, together with Corona and Marriott, are sponsoring total “villages.”

[Photo: Sungai Design]
As soon as sorted, some plastics, like water bottles, are recyclable. Many others are usually not. Indonesia has a single-use plastic disaster. Including to the tons of trash produced by vacationers, there’s additionally an overuse of tiny sachets of on a regular basis staples, from espresso, to instantaneous noodles, to shampoo. Indonesians use about 5.5 million sachets a day of laundry detergent alone.
Sachets, lots of that are made by Unilever, are in style in poorer international locations as a result of they’re low-cost upfront. However they’re half plastic, half aluminum, making them exhausting to separate and recycle, so Bencheghib says they need to ship them to landfills.
Then, there are plastic luggage, about 10 billion of which Indonesians launch into the setting yearly. They account for 36% of the waste that Sungai collects, and are build up into “mountains of trash” of their warehouses. With the intention to reuse these luggage, they determined to formulate them right into a product on the market. The brand new offshoot firm, Sungai Design, will engineer new upcycled merchandise—beginning with two lounge chairs.
The Ombak (“wave”) chairs are every made out of 2,000 plastic luggage. The workforce shreds and heat-presses the luggage, which hardens them whereas maintaining them malleable. They then precision-cut them with computer-controlled cutting machines. They’ll initially promote them in Indonesia at $800 apiece, prone to higher-income households at first, and goal to ship worldwide by the summer time.
The manufacturing is occurring at a gradual tempo, given the founders and workers are doing the whole lot themselves. It presently takes 30 individuals to make one chair per day. However it will possibly scale, given there’s no scarcity of plastic. They’re aiming to introduce extra sturdy merchandise this summer time; they don’t wish to do smaller objects like coasters or sun shades, which are usually short-term and simply find yourself in waste streams once more.

[Photo: Sungai Design]
And so they’ll proceed their Sungai Watch work. Regardless of the quantity they course of, they’re presently solely current on two islands, Bali and East Java—and Indonesia has 17,000. “It looks like that is only a drop within the bucket,” Bencheghib says.
Scaling up appears to be like promising given incoming funding. In addition to the sponsor mannequin, they obtain donations on-line, and not too long ago gained $300,000 of unrestricted grants from the Elevate Prize, which helps social entrepreneurs.
In the end, the objective is to arrange every village to be self reliant inside a number of years. In every location, Sungai educates the neighborhood about higher waste disposal—and concerning the financial advantages of shopping for greater containers of merchandise as a substitute of sachets. Bencheghib says many native authorities have gotten extra “receptive” to slowly introducing higher waste administration processes. “We actually don’t wish to be cleansing rivers for the remainder of our lives,” he says. “Our mission is to be out of enterprise.”