Systems are go on Bangka Island!

Our collaboration with Cleanhub and PRLS launched at the beginning of the month and we’ve been busy since then scaling up operations on Bangka Island ahead of rolling out our waste management program to other islands in the region.

Anna, our project coordinator, is back on site and has made great strides getting our sorting station team and logistics network fully up and running and ready to scale. We’re working with local people, from the sorting to the transportation, contributing to a truly circular economic model.

One of the most exciting elements of our partnership with Cleanhub is that we now have access to the Cleanhub app which helps us properly track the plastic we collect. This means that the trash which we are sending to be recycled or chemically processed to create Alternative Fuels and Raw Materials can properly contribute to Cleanhub’s supply chain, offering stakeholders full transparency on where the plastic has come from and how it’s contributing to a more circular economy. Cleanhub allows businesses to invest in plastic being removed from the environment and so this visibility is vital to their model. This investment flows through to initiatives like ours who are dedicated to implementing waste management models in developing regions.

We’ve had Rizal, from Cleanhub’s Jakarta based team, visit the island and train our staff on how the app works and how it should be used throughout the plastic’s journey, from beach collection to recycling facility. The team really enjoyed learning about this great piece of technology and how their efforts are contributing to a much bigger global effort to keep our oceans clean.

Our sorting station team learnt how to sort the waste and bag it up, weighing the bag and taking a picture of the scales (allowing Cleanhub’s investors to see in real time how much waste is removed) and from where (the pictures are sent to the app with a GPS position).

We shipped a large batch of plastic to the Sulawesi mainland where it was met by the team from Daur Sinar Gemilang, our long standing partner, Amelia Tungka’s company, which will clean and prepare the plastic we’ve collected for recycling and then transport it on. They are based in Manado and process considerable volumes of plastic from our own Initiative and others across the region. Now of course, the team will also transport the low value plastic we’ve collected to the Indocement plant where it will be processed into fuel. We are using the Cleanhub app to register the waste at the sorting station, once it arrives on the Sulawesi mainland and when it’s been processed by the DSG team.

There are many steps and people involved in this model. All of them important and all of them contributing to a cleaner and healthier ocean. We’re getting the building blocks in place to start scaling this model so that we’re ready to hit the ground running when we expand to other islands and resorts across the region.