The question most people start with is why they taught their children to throw garbage into the river. What kind of culture passes that down? You see it in comment sections, in development reports, in the framing of half the environmental campaigns that have ever run in Indonesia. The assumption underneath is that someone, somewhere, decided to raise careless children. The question sounds like curiosity. It is usually judgment. I know because I used to ask it that way too.
Stand at a riverbank in rural Java or rural Bali sometime in the middle of the last century and watch what gets thrown in. Banana peels. Coconut husks. Leaves. Rice that did not get eaten. The bones from last night's fish. Everything organic, everything broken down by the river before it became a problem downstream. The river was not a dump. It was part of the cycle. Waste went in, the river processed it, the water kept moving. This worked. As a system, for generations, because the materials being discarded were the right materials for that system to handle.
Research published in the journal Indonesia and the Malay World, drawing on fieldwork in Yogyakarta, documents that traditional Indonesian disposal practices were not random or careless. Communities separated dry waste from organic kitchen waste. Organic scraps went to livestock or back to the land. Dry material, leaves, paper, natural fiber, went to the river or was burned. The system had internal logic. It processed what the environment could receive. What researchers describe as the littering problem in Indonesian rivers is what happened when the system's inputs changed while the infrastructure around it did not.
In the 1990s, FMCG corporations expanded aggressively into rural Asian markets using single-use plastic sachets. The format had been piloted in India in the 1980s and reached transformative scale across Indonesia in the following decade. Sachets made products affordable for households buying on daily wages. A sachet of shampoo for a few hundred rupiah fit the economy of someone with no certainty about next week's income. The companies understood this and designed for it.
What they replaced was the tingi system, or eceran as it is known more broadly across Indonesia, the practice of buying small quantities of goods in personal containers refilled from larger stocks at the point of sale. Tingi required no packaging. The buyer carried the container, the seller filled it, nothing was left over. Sachets replaced this because the distribution economics worked better for manufacturers. A sachet travels through a supply chain more efficiently than a bulk product requiring containers at point of sale. It reaches the most remote warung. It survives tropical humidity. From the manufacturer's perspective it is close to ideal. From an infrastructure perspective it is a material the existing disposal system was never designed to handle, distributed into communities that had no alternative disposal system waiting.
The person holding the sachet at the riverbank was holding the thing that arrived and doing with it what you do with small disposable things.
Approximately 160 million Indonesians have no access to formal waste collection services, according to World Bank and NPAP data. Rivers carry 83 percent of the plastic waste reaching Indonesia's marine environment from land-based sources, the majority from Java and Sumatra, the most densely populated islands and the ones where the sachet economy penetrated deepest. In communities without collection, the disposal options are burn it, bury it, or put it in the nearest waterway. The absence of a fourth option is not an accident of geography. It is the result of infrastructure investment that did not follow the products into those communities.
Single-use sachets account for roughly 76 percent of plastic pollution in Indonesia. The multi-layer construction, plastic bonded to aluminum foil bonded to more plastic, that makes them cheap to produce cannot be separated by any currently viable recycling process at scale. Unilever's own president for Global Food and Refreshments described the design as "evil because you cannot recycle it." Unilever produces 6.4 billion sachets per year in Indonesia alone. In 2022, Reuters reported that the company had actively lobbied governments in India and the Philippines to block legislation banning sachet sales, despite public commitments to phase them out. Indonesia's Extended Producer Responsibility regulation, introduced in 2019, requires producers to reduce waste from their products by 30 percent before 2029. Implementation remains far behind target.
There are two ways this gets talked about publicly, and I have been on both sides of them at different points.
The government version: change your behavior, here is a regulation, compliance is your responsibility. Infrastructure that would make compliance possible is described as coming later. In practice, the regulation lands first and the infrastructure follows years behind, if at all.
The version circulating in international media and environmental campaigns centers the footage and leaves the supply chain offscreen. A river full of plastic. A village that clearly does not care. What it does not show is the boardroom where someone decided that single-use sachets were the right packaging format for people buying what they can afford that day, or the lobbyists working to keep that format legal in markets where it has already caused measurable damage. The supply chain stays offscreen. The person at the riverbank holds the frame alone.
Neither version asks how the object got into their hand, or who put it there, or what obligations that creates.
I read those campaign articles for years and felt the appropriate concern. It took longer than it should have to notice what was missing, not the pollution, which is real, but the sequence of decisions that preceded it and the actors who made them and who remain, for the most part, outside the conversation about solutions.
The rivers and communities that stopped drowning in plastic did so because someone changed what was available to them. Moral pressure directed at the person holding the sachet has been running for fifty years. The rivers have not noticed.
Pollution is real and the consequences are borne by the communities closest to it. When the dominant public response to a structural problem is to tell the most affected people to behave differently, without changing the conditions that produce the behavior, the result is fifty years of campaigns and a river that is still full of plastic.
The people at the riverbank have been told what to do. They have been shamed in comment sections, targeted by government regulations, photographed by environmental organizations, and featured in documentaries about pollution. What they have not been given is a functioning alternative. No collection truck. No processing facility. No producer that has been held to account for the material it introduced into their community and then declined to retrieve. The moral framing has been enormously useful for everyone except the people it is aimed at. It generates content, it signals concern, it satisfies the need to have said something. It does not build infrastructure. It does not hold producers accountable. And it has been running for long enough that continuing to run it while expecting different results is its own kind of answer.
The behavior will change when the people who introduced the material build the system to handle it. The more interesting question is why that has taken this long, and who has benefited from the wait. The people at the riverbank will adapt. They always have. What they have never been given is something worth adapting to.