DENPASAR: Bali residents are facing growing concern over uncollected trash in the tourist hub, with people increasingly burning rubbish, throwing it into rivers, littering on the roadside, public parks or even in school areas.
Piles of garbage have become a common sight on roadsides. Some of these piles emit a foul odor. The river has become a favourite dumping spot with trash uncollected for weeks or even months.
Some people have decided to burn their trash at home or at the nearest empty plot of land from their house, following the latest regulation aimed at limiting the amount of trash sent to the 32-hectare Suwung landfill in Denpasar, the biggest landfill on the island, before its total closure on Aug 1.
In addition to garbage from Denpasar city, the landfill is also the destination for garbage originating from Badung, Gianyar and Tabanan regencies.
“Many people around my house constantly burn their trash. It is filling the air with smoke and creating a very bad smell of burning plastic. It’s extremely worrying,” said 35-year-old Tyas Ardi, a resident of Denpasar.
The mother of one said that she was concerned her toddler who has had a cough the last several days.
“The smoke is everywhere near my house,” she said.
“From green, the indicator immediately switched to yellow when I open the window,” she said.
“Burning waste is one of the most dangerous responses to the crisis. It poisons the air our children breathe, releases toxins and destroys the very plastics that could have been recovered and recycled,” said environment activist Gary Bencheghib, the founder of Sungai Watch, an environmental organisation working on trash problem.
However, Bencheghib emphasised that communities could not be blamed for the phenomenon.
“People burn [trash] because they feel they have no other option and that tells us everything we need to know about the gap in waste collection services,” he said.
“The answer is not to blame communities, but to give them a real alternative.”
Besides burning their trash, the increasing number of people throwing rubbish into the river has also become worrying. He emphasised that the phenomenon does not only happen in Bali, but also in Java.
“At Sungai Watch, we now operate over 300 barriers across Bali and Java. In 2025, we collected over 1.26 million kilogrammes of waste from rivers, a 17.6 per cent increase from previous year,” he said.
“East Java alone saw a 53.8 per cent jump, reflecting how the crisis is expanding beyond Bali into densely populated areas with even less waste infrastructure.”
Benchegib said that waste captured by the barriers had grown 77-fold from just 10,000kg in 2020 to over 800,000kg in 2025.
“Single-use sachets, plastic bags and styrofoam continue to dominate what we pull from the water,” he said.
On the current waste crisis in Bali, Bencheghib said that it was a result of decades of waste mismanagement on the island.
“Bali is at a tipping point. What we are witnessing is not a-sudden crisis. It’s the result of decades of waste mismanagement finally becoming impossible to ignore,” he said.
“Every river we clean tells the same story, a system that has failed to keep up with how much we consume and how little infrastructure exists to handle it.”
He added that the tragedy is that Bali had always been a place defined by its relationship to water, and today the rivers were carrying plastic to the sea instead of life to rice fields.
Bencheghib said that he was grateful for the progress, especially the single-use plastic bag ban and recent provincial regulations.
However, he issued a warning that “what Bali urgently needs is universal waste collection across every village, proper investment in sorting and recycling infrastructure, accountability for producers who flood the island with single-use packaging and a clear end to open dumping and open burning,” said the man who is now running 1,260km from Bali to Jakarta as part of the Run for Rivers campaign to bring national attention to this crisis and to push for stronger action over river pollution.
“This is solvable but only if policy is matched with funding and enforcement.” Bali has been in a waste crisis seen since the government decided to close down Suwung Landfill without providing an alternative end destination.
Since April 1, the biggest landfill in Bali has only accepted inorganic waste until its planned total closure on Aug 1.
However, the policy has been criticised by many waste collectors who united as the Bali Waste Self-Management Communication Forum, and decided to send more than 400 trucks full of foul odour organic waste to government offices last week in protest.
“Most of the trash are organic, but we are not allowed to bring it into Suwung Landfill. It's causing a foul odour. That’s become our main problem now,” he said.
The protest has finally been responded to positively in a new policy by the environment minister.
The Suwung landfill now accepts organic trash twice a week. However, the policy is only valid until July 31, as the landfill will still to be closed in August.
A tourism professor from Udayana University, I Nyoman Sunarta said that the trash issue should be addressed wisely to save Bali tourism. He said that the waste crisis will impact the number of tourists visiting Bali once the government fails to address the crisis.
“If the crisis is not addressed wisely, of course it would impact [tourism]. But I feel sure that the government is already preparing their programme to solve the waste crisis. Let see it,” he said. - The Jakarta Post/ANN
