Indonesia Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

Where the Work Remains

This is the gap worth naming plainly: Indonesia generates roughly 7.8 million metric tonnes of plastic waste a year, and independent research puts around 4.9 million tonnes of it as mismanaged, uncollected, openly dumped, or leaking from poorly managed sites. Estimates consistently place Indonesia among the world’s top handful of contributors to ocean plastic, with over a million tonnes reaching the sea annually. None of that shows up in the SDR’s own plastic indicator, because that indicator only tracks exports, and Indonesia exports very little of its own plastic waste. If anything, the flow runs the other way: Indonesia has become a net importer of plastic waste from wealthier countries, a shift that accelerated after China closed its own imports in 2018.

Plastic waste: how it physically works

The mechanics of that import trade are worth spelling out. It’s a real, priced commodity market, not scrap hidden in returning shipping containers: in 2024, Indonesia imported 262,900 tonnes of plastic waste, worth roughly $105 million, a 4% rise on 2023. The Netherlands is consistently the largest single supplier, sending well over 100,000 tonnes most years, ahead of Germany and Belgium. European recyclers export this material largely, because it’s the plastic hardest to recycle profitably at home, mixed or low-grade scrap that needs manual sorting, and it’s cheaper to ship it to a country with lower labor and processing costs than to sort it domestically. Reporting from Break Free From Plastic in December 2025 found this pattern accelerating rather than easing: as EU plastic exports to the Netherlands, Turkey, and Poland have fallen, exports to Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam have risen in their place.

Health and environmental costs of plastic waste

What happens to it once it arrives is where the official story and the reporting on the ground diverge. Officially, most imported scrap feeds Indonesia’s own recycling industry, cheaper raw material than virgin plastic. Field research published by Ecoton in May 2025 found a messier reality: much of the lowest-grade material is effectively unsellable, and ends up dumped in village-adjacent sites in East Java, or burned directly as boiler fuel by small-scale tofu producers, whose product then absorbs the toxic smoke, with air quality in the affected villages measured well past safe thresholds. Importers and recyclers profit from the cheap feedstock; the health and environmental costs land on the rural communities near the processing sites, not on whoever profits from the trade.

Regulation

Indonesia’s government moved to close this off entirely in late 2024, announcing a halt to all plastic waste import approvals starting in 2025, with the Environment Minister stating that the country already has enough plastic sitting in its own landfills to sort and recycle instead. Separately, the EU’s own Waste Shipment Regulation will bar EU countries from exporting plastic waste to non-OECD countries at all from November 2026, unless the receiving country opts in and can demonstrate it can handle it sustainably, a restriction that would close this route from the supply side as well.

No green ratings

On the dashboard itself, Indonesia carries no green ratings at all, the only country RYB has covered with that distinction. Good Health and Well-Being (SDG 3), Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure (SDG 9), Sustainable Cities and Communities (SDG 11), Life on Land (SDG 15), Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions (SDG 16), and Partnerships for the Goals (SDG 17) all rate the dashboard’s worst color, red. Indonesia’s Corruption Perceptions Index score, 34 out of 100, sits level with Bosnia and Herzegovina’s.

Indonesia’s spillover rank sits alongside every other country RYB tracks on the Global Responsibility page, where rankings like these are shown together across all the countries covered on this site.