Green Goodness
Mohamad Bijaksana Junerosano addresses environmental issues in Indonesia through social entrepreneurship to promote a more sustainable form of the circular economy
As an archipelagic nation with 80,000km of coastline spanning across upwards of 17,000 islands, Indonesia has plenty to be grateful for when it comes to nature and its resources. However, harnessing these potentials to fuel growth must be done sustainably for generations to come; an imbalance in executing these two systems would cause many issues. Young leaders of today are growing in awareness of these growing concerns, voicing their opinions and taking actions in daily practice. Mohamad Bijaksana Junerosano, for example, started to grow interested quite early in his life after watching a TV programme about the waste management issue in Jakarta. According to the Indonesian Institute of Sciences report in 2019, about 100,000 to 400,000 tonnes of waste goes to Indonesia’s ocean every year. Jakarta alone contributes around 7,200 tonnes of waste every day; at this rate, there might be more waste than ocean biota in 2050.
Junerosano was inspired to learn more about waste management during his years studying environmental engineering at the Bandung Institute of Technology. In 2005, he started the Greeneration Indonesia movement in Bandung, which then birthed many other environmental initiatives, such as the Diet Kantong Plastik and Gerakan Indonesia Bebas Sampah. “Later on, those initiatives further evolved into the Greeneration Foundation in 2014, which focuses on the circular economy with its masterpiece programme, ‘Indonesia Circular Economy Forum’,” Junerosano said. Expanding beyond activism, in
2011, he and his team founded PT Greeneration Indonesia as social entrepreneurship, selling recycled goods alongside another business unit in waste management.
The latter then became its own company in 2014, named Waste4change, which is now preparing for Series A funding. “I think the public needs to know more about this entity called social enterprise,” Junerosano said. “Running a social enterprise is not an easy task. Knowing that, in 2021, we launched ecoxyztem, a venture builder to focus on climate and technology issues. We hope this company could help grow more climate-tech start-ups in Indonesia so we can work together on addressing environmental problems.” As one of the pioneers who has worked in the industry for quite a while, he firmly believed in the role of social enterprises to help grow Indonesia’s economy. “Social enterprises aim for more than just economic benefits. It also focuses on creating impacts in solving societal and environmental problems and investing the profits back in a responsible manner; in that way, we create a circular economy.”
Moreover, Junerosano saw Indonesia’s ecosystem as very accommodating for social enterprises to flourish. “Without a doubt, our economy is one of the biggest economies in the world. However, behind the rapid economic development, many social and environmental problems need to be addressed,” he said. “Finding solutions to these issues require a lot of work, and the stakeholders and decisionmakers have been considering social enterprises as one of the approaches to solve them. As such, collaborations among organisations and institutions are needed, including with social enterprises.”
In the future, Junerosano hoped for more public involvement in social enterprises through public crowdfunding. “The Indonesian people are still not familiar with equity crowdfunding yet. With our friends at Greeneration, we are trying to create a concept for public participation in tackling environmental problems in Indonesia,” he said. “We cannot do it on our own and need help from officials, religious leaders, anti-corruption organisations, academics, the private sectors, and many others. The responsibilities are quite significant, considering public interest and participation being at stake here but, the results would be for the good of us all.”