Swapping rubbish for travel tickets on Indonesia’s popular ‘plastic bus’
DOZENS of people clutching bags full of plastic bottles and disposable cups queue at a busy bus terminal in the Indonesian city of Surabaya – where passengers can swap rubbish for travel tickets.
The nation is the world’s secondbiggest marine polluter behind China and has pledged to reduce plastic waste in its waters some 70 per cent by 2025 by boosting recycling, raising public awareness and curbing usage.
The Surabaya scheme has been a hit in t he cit y of 2.9 million, wit h nearly 16,000 passengers trading trash for f ree travel each week, according to aut horities.
“This is a very smart solution. It’s free and instead of throwing away bottles people now collect them and bring them here,” explains 48-yearold resident Fransiska Nugrahepi.
An hour-long bus ride with unlimited stops costs t hree large bottles, five medium bottles or 10 plastic cups. But they must be cleaned and cannot be squashed.
There is a steady stream of people squeezing past sacks f ull of recyclables to deposit plastic in four bins behind the small office and cla im t heir t ickets.
Franki Yuanus, a Surabaya transport officia l, says the programme aims not only to cut waste but a lso to tack le traffic congestion by encouraging people to switch to public t ra nsit.
“There has been a good response from the public,” insists Yuanus, adding: “Paying with plastic is one of the things that has made people enthusiastic because up until now plastic waste was just seen as useless.”
Currently t he fleet consists of 20 near-new buses, each with recycling bins and ticket officers who roam t he aisles to collect any lef tover bott les.
Authorities said roughly si x tons of plastic rubbish are collected
from passengers each month before being auctioned to recycling companies.
Nurhayati Anwar, who uses the bus about once a week with her t hree-year-old son, said t he rubbish swap programme is changing how people see t heir throwaway cups and bott les.
“Now people in t he office or at home are t r y ing to collect [r ubbish] instead of just throwing it away,” the 44-year-old accountant said af ter trading in severa l bott les for a f ree ride.
“We now k now that plastic is not good for the env ironment – people in Surabaya are starting to learn.”
Other parts of Indonesia, an archipelago of some 17,000 islands, are a lso tr y ing to tack le t he issue.
Bali is phasing in a ban on singleuse plastic straws and bags to rid the popular holiday island of waste choking its water ways, while aut horities in t he capita l Ja karta are considering a similar bylaw to rid t he cit y of plastic shopping bags.
Governments around the globe are increasingly taking measures to curb the menace of disposable plastic.
A 2016 report by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation warned t here would be more plasticthan fish, by weight, in t he seas by 2050.
It estimated eight million tonnes of plastics enter oceans annually.
It added: “This is equiva lent to dumping the contents of one garbage truck into the ocean ever y minute. If no action is ta ken, t his is expected to increase to t wo per minute by 2030 and four per minute by 2050.”