Jembrana

Project STOP’s city partnership in Jembrana regency, located on the northwest coast of Bali, was launched in 2019 and was fully funded by the Alliance to End Plastic Waste.

According to  research, prior to Project STOP commencing Jembrana was estimated to leak approximately 13,200 tons of plastic into the environment each year, due to its population size and lack of waste management infrastructure. Jembrana’s Ijo Gading River is Bali’s largest ocean plastic contributor, accounting for 12% of the province’s total ocean plastics leakage.

The Alliance’s three-year collaboration with Project STOP aimed to create a zero-leakage plastic waste system in Jembrana, and included:

• Conducting diagnostic studies to understand how and why plastic waste enters the environment and designing a new, tailored system to combat it
• Building and supplying solid waste management equipment to scale up collection and sorting efforts
• Hiring local people at living wages and responsible working conditions to manage and staff the new waste management system
• Partnering with community NGOs to encourage behaviour change at the community level through awareness and educational programs so more people fully utilize the waste management and recycling system that is being created to dispose of waste.
• Cleaning up beaches and rivers in consultation with the local government.

The aim of the Alliance and Project STOP was to dramatically improve waste collection in Jembrana, bring waste collection for the first time to households, create new, permanent local jobs in the waste management industry, and clean up the waste that already exists in Jembrana. This project was designed to become economically self-sufficient, where the system could be fully operated by local government and communities.

 In June 2023 Project STOP Jembrana was fully handed over to the local regency government.