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Cables, bottles and bags. In Bali, hundreds of volunteers dive into the mangroves of the river every week to clean up the wastewater. They are part of the Sungai Watch Association (Shuangxi The company, which means river in Indonesia, was founded in 2020 by Kelly Bencheghib, 31, and her two brothers, Gary and Sam, who moved here with their parents from Paris two decades ago. The aim is to tackle pollution in Indonesia, which has the second worst management of plastic waste in the world, according to a study published in the journal Environmental Science. science 2015. In areas without rubbish collection, waste is burned or dumped in makeshift landfills, from where it reaches the sea via waterways. The situation is particularly bad during the rainy season from October to March, when large numbers of bags, cans and straws wash up on beaches. «We started working on this issue as teenagers, involving school friends and local businesses through a Facebook page Changing the World», says Kelly, who spent seven years in the United States, graduated in economics, and then returned to Bali. “As children, we spent hours collecting garbage near our home in the south of the island. I remember someone telling us: “Why are you so worried? The garbage will just disappear in the waves.” On the contrary, in Bali, as in the rest of the world, and also due to overtourism, a real emergency is unfolding: of the 1.6 million tons of garbage generated each year, 303,000 tons are plastic waste, of which 33,000 tons float on the surface of the water in the rivers. To capture them, Sungai Watch has developed an ingenious system of floating barriers, based on the advice of local engineers.
«Three years after the project started, we have installed 270 barriers (in Bali and Java, NordLB), funded by communities and companies who, in return for their donations, get to have their names on the floats”, explains Kelly. “Our team of 140 river warriors clean 200 rivers and streams every day, demonstrating the power of targeted collective action”. More than 1.7 million kilograms of waste are collected each week and sent to special sorting centers. Most of which is discarded in landfills, plastics are washed, shredded, shipped to processing plants in Java and, where possible, recycled on site. A very long and tiring process. «In the beginning, due to a lack of financial resources, we washed everything by hand in buckets. Today, we rely on electric motors and blowers to speed up the process. The water we use is not wasted: it is recycled in a closed-loop system.”
Sungai Watch activists also work to raise awareness of the emergency in the local community, strengthen their sense of belonging and remember the importance of keeping the river clean, around which the lives of the Balinese people revolve. «With the cooperation of the priests, they are called here MankusPresident of the Farmers Association Pekaseh Village Chief’s village headwe meet with each community we work with at least three times a year: before and after the barrier is installed, and when we provide data to jointly evaluate the results of our efforts”.
Ideally, the emergency would be solved upstream through circular waste systems and minimised or reusable packaging. But for now, it seems that in Bali, due to a lack of vision and state funding, the only solution is individual initiative. The Bencheghib brothers have been working to raise awareness among government officials for a decade. In 2017, Gary and Sam sailed for two weeks along Indonesia’s Citarum River, one of the most polluted in the world, in a kayak made from plastic bottles: the aim was to show everyone how difficult it is to paddle amidst a wave of waste (the company has collected millions of views on social media). Sungai Watch also reaches out to the producers of the plastic packaging collected in the river – including Danone, Unilever and Wings Surya Indonesia – to try to spark a reflection and encourage changes in favour of a circular economy.
The tireless brothers’ latest challenge is called “Sungai Design”: a non-profit company founded in March last year that is dedicated to producing practical and durable furniture, ensuring that even the most difficult to recycle and low-value plastics (such as shopping) can get a second life. Despite an island-wide ban, plastic bags still account for nearly a third of collected waste. Designed in collaboration with creative director Michael Russek and made possible by a thermocompressor, the first product is called Waveswhich means “wave” in Indonesian: it is a chair made from two thousand plastic bags recycled from Bali’s rivers (available in three colors: granite black, ocean blue and concrete white). “When you choose a chair from our collection, you are not just buying a piece of furniture: you are embracing the radical transformation of an object from waste to resource”.
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