On Rinca Island, waste was once a common sight, with residents often burning or burying rubbish or leaving it scattered around the village. Waldi, a young resident involved in coral conservation and chair of the Pasir Panjang Village Waste Bank, is working with his community to change how waste is managed and protect the island’s marine environment.

For Waldi, keeping the island clean meant addressing a problem that could not be solved through occasional beach clean-ups alone. His community needed a practical way to manage its waste, and he believed young people had a role to play in making that happen.

“We are the younger generation who experience and see waste in front of our eyes becoming more and more polluting our island,” he says. “We need to be the ones who find the solution, because we will be the ones who should take care of the island.”

His words reflect a growing sense of responsibility among young people in Pasir Panjang, where environmental protection is inseparable from the future of their community.

In April 2026, Waldi and other young residents formed Rinca Peduli, a community of around 20 young people who organise clean-ups two to three times a week. They collect waste along the shoreline and around the village, including areas along routes used by visitors travelling to see Komodo dragons. But collecting waste was only part of the challenge. Without a dependable way to handle what they gathered, the same problem would return.

The village needed a system that could keep waste from accumulating in the first place.

Making waste worth collecting

In August 2026, Pasir Panjang opened its own waste bank, giving residents a place to bring recyclable materials such as plastic bottles, cardboard, glass bottles and aluminium cans. The materials are weighed and recorded, with their value credited to residents’ accounts so they can accumulate savings and withdraw the money later.

In its first three months, the waste bank collected more than three tonnes of recyclable materials. What had previously been burned, buried or discarded could now be separated, collected and sold.

The change has also influenced how residents think about their waste. Waldi says people increasingly ask when the waste bank will reopen because they have already sorted and stored materials at home. Some even ask whether the team can collect recyclables directly from their houses.

“We need to take care (the island), as we only have this one island,” Waldi says.

The waste bank is part of a wider initiative developed through UNDP’s Plastics Circularity Project, supported by The Coca-Cola Foundation, in collaboration with the West Manggarai Environment and Land Agency. It is the first sub-unit of G-LINGKO, a waste bank initiative established by the agency to help communities sort and collect recyclable materials and connect them with buyers.

For Waldi and his neighbours, that connection matters. Collecting waste becomes more sustainable when people know where to take it, how it will be handled and whether it can generate value. The system also helps prevent recyclable materials from being burned or entering the surrounding environment.

But the idea behind G-LINGKO began with a much smaller step, far from the village on Rinca Island.

Starting with what is possible

Miranda, a civil servant at the West Manggarai Environment and Land Agency, had become familiar with the daily challenges of waste management. Complaints about waste were common, and the volume of waste being generated continued to grow. She wanted to find a practical way to reduce the amount reaching the landfill, even without the resources to build new processing facilities or transform the entire system at once.

“I thought about what small step we could take so that waste would not keep piling up at the landfill,” she says. “We could not change everything in Labuan Bajo at once, so we started on a smaller scale.”

For Miranda, that first step was sorting waste.

The initiative began within the agency, where she encouraged fellow staff to separate recyclable materials and set aside the proceeds from their sale. The effort was initially a simple waste bank, but it later became known as G-LINGKO, a name associated locally with communal work and shared agricultural land. The name reflects an idea at the heart of the initiative: waste management works better when people take responsibility together.

Miranda wanted the practice to spread beyond the office. She began encouraging schools and community groups to separate their waste, including children who were already familiar with collecting bottles and other materials to sell.

During one visit to a prayer group in the Wae Nahi residential area in Labuan Bajo, the team weighed the children’s collected recyclables and paid them for what they had brought. When the team returned, the children arrived with a larger collection. One child who had previously received Rp5,000 went home with Rp15,000.

The difference was modest, but the experience helped the children see that sorting waste could produce a tangible result. Materials that might otherwise have been discarded could still have economic value.

Miranda saw an opportunity to build on their enthusiasm, teaching them to separate materials more carefully so they would be easier for buyers to recover and process.

“Every person generates waste through their daily activities,” she explains. “The question is how we can manage the waste we produce ourselves. The government cannot do it all alone.”

For her, changing habits at the source is essential. A plastic bottle kept separate from food scraps is easier to recover than one mixed into a bag of household waste. When recyclable materials are sorted early, they have a better chance of being sold and reused instead of taking up space at the landfill.

The next challenge is making sure those materials have somewhere to go. Through G-LINGKO, local waste banks can collect recyclables from their communities and connect them with offtakers, businesses that purchase recyclable materials for further use. Pasir Panjang’s waste bank extends that network to Rinca Island, helping connect residents’ efforts to a wider collection system.

Finding value at the landfill

Not all waste can be recycled, and not every household has access to a waste bank. The remaining waste still needs to be collected, processed and disposed of. At waste processing sites (TPST) and landfills (TPA), workers may also recover materials that were not separated earlier.

At Warloka landfill, that work comes with conditions that are difficult to ignore. Roni, an operator who has worked at the site for nearly seven years, says the smell becomes particularly pungent when workers dig up or handle waste that has been buried for a long time.

The odour is more than an unpleasant part of the job. Roni worries about the possible effects of working in close contact with waste, especially on his breathing and health. Yet he has also learned to recognise materials that still hold value among the waste arriving at the site.

“I started with myself,” he says, recalling how he began separating recyclable items before encouraging other workers to join him.

Over time, the effort grew into a team of 19 workers, including Roni, who recover plastic bottles, buckets, metal and aluminium cans, scrap metal, paper and cardboard. The materials are sorted and gathered for sale rather than left to be buried with the rest of the waste.

Finding buyers was initially another challenge. Roni had to seek them out and arrange transport for the materials himself. By building connections with recycling partners, he helped establish a more dependable route for selling what the team collected.

Roni’s experience shows both the value and the limitations of recovering waste at the end of the process. Materials that have been mixed with other waste can be harder to separate, and workers must handle them in difficult conditions. Sorting earlier, before waste is collected and transported, can make recovery easier and reduce the amount that ultimately needs to be disposed of.

Connecting the pieces

The experiences of Miranda, Roni and Waldi illustrate how waste management depends on a chain of work, with each stage affecting the next.

At home, residents can separate recyclable materials before they become mixed with food scraps and other waste. Waste banks such as Pasir Panjang collect and record those materials, then channel them to offtakers who purchase recyclables for further use. Other waste continues through the local collection and processing system. At an Integrated Waste Processing Site, or TPST, workers sort the remaining waste further and recover what they can, while the residue is sent to the landfill for final disposal. Materials that arrive at the landfill may still be recovered there, as Roni’s team demonstrates.

The more recyclable material that can be separated at the source, the less needs to be recovered from mixed waste later. But each stage matters: households need clear information and accessible collection points, waste banks need dependable buyers, and workers at processing sites and landfills need systems that allow them to handle waste more effectively.

Without these connections, even an enthusiastic community clean-up can struggle to create lasting change. Waste management cannot rest with one agency, one facility or one group of volunteers. It requires people to work together, supported by a system that makes responsible choices possible.

As Indonesia marks Youth Pledge Day on 28 October, their experiences offer a reminder that collective responsibility is built through action as much as words. The youth who pledged a shared commitment to their homeland in 1928 helped shape the country’s future. Today, young people such as Waldi, Miranda and Roni are putting their own sense of responsibility into practice, beginning with the places they call home.

Their efforts will not solve Indonesia’s waste challenge overnight. But a young island community building a waste bank, a civil servant encouraging children to sort recyclables and landfill workers finding value in discarded materials all show how change can begin with a small, practical step.

For Waldi, the reason to keep going is simple: “We need to take care, as we only have this one island.”