Plastics in Circles - Smart Waste Collective

Investing in Impact

P4G has provided this partnership with US $546,004 in catalytic grant funding.  

Smart Waste Collective aims to improve working standards for waste workers and optimize efficiency in waste collecting and sorting. It will do this in collaboration with local partners through its “Smart Waste Centers,” which feature equipment such as waste sorting conveyor belts to sort more quickly and safely and waste collection vehicles and baling machines to compress materials for more efficient transport and storage. At the centers, a dashboard tracks key performance indicators, including waste flows and on the ground collection to improve operational performance.  

The partnership also seeks to incorporate social equity by training informal waste pickers or low-skilled workers as waste managers working under high Quality, Health, Safety and Environment (QHSE) Standards, maintaining efficient processes and operations.  

During the P4G funding period, the partnership will implement best practice waste collection with two trucks and processing at the sorting center. This will reduce collection and transportation costs by more than 20%; create safe jobs for 34 sorters and collectors; and divert more than 800 tons per year of waste from landfills. It will also implement an impact monitoring tool and learning activities to optimize the plastics value chain and rapidly scale up the learnings from the project. Through its activities, this partnership will help meet the Indonesian government’s commitment to achieve a 75% reduction in marine plastic and increase waste handling to 70% by 2025. 

In the long-term, Smart Waste Collective aims to expand across Indonesia and to other P4G partner countries, creating 3,500 jobs, saving more than 150,000 tons per year of plastic from the landfill. 

This partnership is part of the Indonesian-Dutch Plastics in Circles consortium led by MVO Nederland, in cooperation with the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management and the Netherlands Embassy in Jakarta.