For the past few weeks I have had something that keeps pulling me to Ubud almost every day. The road in the morning has its own rhythm, people on motorbikes heading to the market, to work, somewhere the day is waiting for them, moving without hurry the way mornings here still allow. Coming back in the afternoon the same road feels different. The same kind of riders, but the quality of their attention has changed. You can see it in how they sit on the bike, how they steer without quite looking, mind already somewhere else before the body has arrived. I have been watching this for weeks now, and somewhere in the middle of all of it I started noticing the smoke.
Not incense. The puras along this road have their own smoke, thin and purposeful, you know it by its smell and where it comes from. This is heavier, sits lower, comes from behind walls and across fields. I could not tell you with certainty what is burning. But April came, and the ban on organic waste at TPA Suwung took effect, and now when I ride through it I think I have a reasonable guess.
Bali produces 3,436 tons of waste every day. Each of the island's 4.4 million residents generates roughly 0.7 kilograms daily. Tourists generate 3.5 times more, and hotel rooms alone produce nine kilograms per room per night. In 2025, Bali recorded 7.05 million international visitors, its highest figure in history, plus an estimated ten million domestic ones.
Of those 3,436 daily tons, somewhere between 65 and 68 percent is organic. Food scraps, garden trimmings, and the banana leaves and palm fronds and flower offerings that Balinese Hinduism places at temples and crossroads and thresholds every morning, the canang sari that decompose into the pavement before noon. This fraction gets considerably less attention than the plastic. Plastic photographs well. It washes up on beaches, wraps around turtles, travels across oceans in ways that produce images and outrage. Organic waste does none of these things. It sits wherever it lands, ferments, and sinks into the ground. Not photogenic, and two-thirds of the problem.
Organic waste in the tropics is harder to manage than plastic, and the difference is structural. Plastic has a market. Indonesia has an estimated 3.7 million informal waste pickers whose livelihoods depend on collecting and selling it. Organic waste has no such economy. It cannot be recycled, only processed, and processing requires facilities that require investment. High temperatures accelerate decomposition, high humidity increases moisture content, and organic material in a tropical landfill does not dry out and stabilize the way it might elsewhere. It ferments, producing methane and leachate that contaminate the ground beneath. Bali's 65 to 68 percent organic fraction is not unusual. It is also the fraction that costs the most to manage and that Bali has put off the longest.
For decades, most of that organic waste went to TPA Suwung, a landfill in South Denpasar opened in 1984 on 32 hectares, designed for 800 tons per day, and receiving 1,000 to 1,500 for as long as anyone can remember. By this year the trash mountain stood 35 meters high (ten storeys) at the edge of one of the most-visited tourist destinations on earth. In October 2023 it caught fire. Methane from decomposing organic waste ignited, and southern Bali choked on toxic smoke for days. Similar fires burned in 2018. The former head of Bali's Environment Agency has been named a criminal suspect. Leachate readings showed contamination levels far beyond any safe standard for surrounding soil and groundwater.
On 1 April 2026, TPA Suwung stopped accepting organic waste. The directive came from Indonesia's Minister of Environment, Hanif Faisol Nurofiq, who stated in March: "What may enter Suwung is only inorganic waste. Organic waste must be resolved at the source." On the first day, officers from Satpol PP and the Provincial Environment Agency stood at the entrance, climbing into the back of each truck with ladders to inspect the load. Trucks carrying mixed or organic waste were turned away.
Two-thirds of 3,436 tons per day is roughly 2,200 tons. If households process that fraction themselves, the remainder becomes manageable. It took about a week to find out where those 2,200 tons were actually going.
Open burning spread across Denpasar neighborhoods within days. Sesetan, Bypass Ngurah Rai, scattered residential areas where residents could not compost, could not bring waste to TPS3R facilities that were already at capacity, and could not send it to Suwung. In Badung, a fire near Pura Padma Buana grew large enough that fire trucks had to respond. Satpol PP Denpasar handled at least four formal burning reports in the first week. The waste that did not burn went to rivers: Denpasar's nine rivers recorded a 15.91 percent increase in recovered waste within days of the ban, from 26.4 to 30.6 tons per day, often pre-packaged in plastic bags, meaning deliberate disposal rather than runoff. In Desa Baha, Badung, a resident named Virda told reporters that since the Suwung closure, no more garbage trucks came at all.
Governor Koster held a closed evaluation meeting on day seven and announced that daily truck volumes at Suwung had dropped 50 percent, which he called extraordinary progress. The question nobody in that meeting answered on the record was where the other half was going.
The policy rests on Pergub No. 47/2019, source-based waste management that has been official provincial policy since 2019. For years it sat dormant. The Suwung deadline activated it: the landfill cannot receive organic waste, so households must process it. Residents are to separate waste into three streams and handle the organic fraction at home through composting, Black Soldier Fly farming, biogas conversion, or teba modern, a backyard method adapted from traditional Balinese land practice.
Badung has distributed 141,719 bag composters, 3,570 bin composters, and 16,053 teba modern units to households. Denpasar has 23 TPS3R processing units with a combined capacity of around 73 tons per day; Badung's 42 units handle around 52. Of the 176,000 bag composters planned for Denpasar, only 40,000 had been distributed by early April because of supply chain problems. A carbonization machine with 250-ton daily capacity was stuck in transit due to Eid al-Fitr logistics and could not begin operating until 10 April at earliest. TPS3R facilities across both cities began rejecting private collectors because they had already hit capacity. The drivers whose trucks were turned back at Suwung on 1 April told local press they had nowhere to take the organic waste in the volumes they carry.
Bali's combined TPS3R capacity in Denpasar and Badung totals around 125 tons per day, against an organic waste stream in those two areas alone of several hundred tons. The Governor himself put the province's maximum processing capacity at 500 tons per day. The 2,200 tons of daily organic waste does not fit in that number.
Both composting and Black Soldier Fly farming work, and have been demonstrated at scale elsewhere. South Korea moved from 2 percent food waste recycling to 95 percent, but over eighteen years, building 54 processing facilities and 6,000 RFID-enabled smart bins before asking households to do anything differently. The mandate came after the infrastructure, not before it. Surabaya achieved 90 percent household participation through four years of organizing, 374 waste banks, and 19,000 composting units, externally funded. Kamikatsu in Japan required subsidized home composters, resident-operated drop-off centers, and twenty years of community education before reaching 80 percent diversion.
South Korea built the infrastructure first and then asked households to change. Bali closed the landfill first and is now describing the infrastructure as something that will follow.
The compost market compounds the gap. Denpasar waste management officials have documented that Balinese farmers resist fertilizing their fields with waste-derived material. Subsidized urea delivers 46 percent nitrogen at around eleven cents per kilogram; compost delivers one to two percent nitrogen at around five cents. Per unit of actual nutrient, synthetic fertilizer is far cheaper, and the Indonesian government spends roughly two billion dollars annually subsidizing it, with five percent or less going to organic alternatives. A household that composts successfully has produced something the market does not want, at a price it cannot match, against a product subsidized by the same government asking it to compost. This is not a failure of individual effort or awareness. It is the absence of the ecosystem around composting: the market, the incentive structure, the collection system, the end-user, without which the output of any household effort has nowhere to go.
On 2 February 2026, at the National Coordination Meeting in Bogor, President Prabowo displayed photographs of Bali's beaches and addressed the Governor directly: "Do tourists want to come see garbage? How can tourists want to come there and see garbage?" He recounted a meeting in South Korea where a general had told him: "Your Excellency, I just came from Bali. Bali so dirty now. Bali not nice." He declared war on garbage, mobilized the military, ordered school students to clean beaches on Fridays, and committed to 34 waste-to-energy plants within two years.
It is worth pausing on what happened in that room. The President of Indonesia was citing the opinion of a foreign military officer about the cleanliness of a tourist destination as the basis for national waste policy. Meanwhile, in the weeks that followed, residents in Sesetan were burning their kitchen scraps in the street because there was nowhere else to take them. The landfill that produced the smoke and the leachate Prabowo was reacting to was built in 1984. The tourism boom arrived in the 1990s. The infrastructure gap is older than the problem he described at Rakornas.
Earlier in 2025, Governor Koster had announced a bank statement screening policy for incoming tourists and named Bali's two most pressing problems in the same remarks: traffic jams and waste. The organic waste mandate followed months later. One policy filtered who could enter the island. The other told residents what to do with their kitchen scraps. The 3,436 tons accumulating daily sat somewhere between them, unaddressed by either.
Bengaluru tried the same sequence. It mandated household composting and source segregation in 2012, after its own landfill was forced to close. A decade later, segregation had improved from roughly 30 percent to 40 to 50 percent. Three thousand tonnes of unsold compost accumulated. Illegal dumping spread. Waste collectors mixed sorted material back into single streams during transport, undoing household effort before it reached any facility. The mandate was enforced without building the infrastructure to support it. Bengaluru went from Garden City to the city with garbage mountains visible from its tech campuses.
On 6 April, six days into the ban, DPRD Bali Chairman Dewa Made Mahayadnya announced in a parliamentary session that Denpasar's organic waste would be shipped to Klungkung regency, with Rp400 billion from the provincial budget allocated for the purpose. The planned site was an Eks Galian C parcel in Desa Gunaksa, Kecamatan Dawan, on the old lava flow from Gunung Agung's 1963 eruption. Governor Koster denied it the next day. He called the Rp400 billion figure a lie, said the material was not waste but shredded compost, destined for a buffer plantation at the Pusat Kebudayaan Bali cultural center in Klungkung. Klungkung's regent set conditions. His exact phrasing: "Don't let the provincial government hide from us. They dump waste in our area while we're still struggling to dispose of our own."
This was not the first time. In late 2025, the province planned to send 180 trucks per day to TPA Landih in Bangli. Bangli set conditions. The governor inspected in January, declared the site not feasible, and cancelled. Before that, there was a plan involving Gianyar. Each regency in turn has become the next candidate for someone else's unresolved problem. TPA Suwung itself was, for four decades, the same arrangement: the urban and tourist core of Bali funneling waste toward a landfill near Denpasar's mangroves and calling it solved. The pattern running through Gianyar, Bangli, and Klungkung is not a new pattern. It is the same desk-to-desk movement, at a smaller scale, with less time to spare.
On 16 April, ten days after the ban took effect, Governor Koster met with representatives of Bali's waste hauling cooperatives, Forum Komunikasi Swakelola Sampah Bali, who had driven their trucks to the Governor's office in protest. The cooperatives said TPS3R facilities were rejecting their sorted loads because capacity had already been exceeded. Koster coordinated with the Ministry of Environment and returned with a concession: organic waste may enter Suwung twice a week until 31 July 2026. April's ban did not survive April intact.
The waste-to-energy plant has a groundbreaking date of 8 July 2026. A cooperation agreement has been signed between the provincial government, Denpasar, Badung, and Danantara. The contractor is Zhejiang Weiming Environment Protection, a Chinese firm. Construction is estimated at fifteen months, putting initial operations at December 2027. The landfill that will feed it closes completely on 1 August 2026, twenty-four days after the first stone is laid.