This company hauls plastic waste from Indonesia’s rivers—and turns it into furniture

Indonesia is the fourth-most-populous country in the world and the second-biggest plastic polluter after China, producing 3.2 metric tons of plastic waste annually. Many regions in the country lack suitable waste management infrastructure, and about half of the trash is burned, causing carbon emissions and health risks. Most of the rest ends up in bodies of water.



Family-run nonprofit Sungai Watch has been taking on the burden of cleaning up the plastic in Indonesia’s rivers so it doesn’t reach the ocean. It intercepts trash with buoyant barriers, then collects and sorts it for recycling where possible. Today, it’s launching a sister company, Sungai Design, to upcycle some of the hardest-to-recycle plastics into durable products—starting with a set of lounge chairs made from plastic bags.



[Photo: Sungai Design]



After relocating to Bali with his family 20 years ago, at age 7, French-born Sam Bencheghib started to notice the overwhelming waste. Bali was “this beautiful paradise that you see on postcards and on Instagram,” Bencheghib says. “But we’ve really seen it get devastated with plastics.” Bencheghib, the youngest of three siblings, would clean up beaches with his brother and sister. But it proved relatively ineffective, because most of the plastics in the ocean flow in from rivers.



In 2020, in their parents’ garage, the siblings built a long, floating barrier, strung together by metal wire, with a metal grid underneath that extends underwater to collect debris. They placed it in a river near their home to keep trash from entering the ocean. The next day, they found it had collected 110 pounds of plastic.



[Photo: Sungai Design]



Three years later, they have 270 barriers, custom-made for different river depths—and eight sorting centers, where staff members sort plastic into 30 different categories. They employ what they call a “village model”: In each polluted area, they have 15 to 20 barriers, a sorting center, and about 12 staff, forming a “self-sustaining cleanup operation for the region.” To date, the barriers have collected 1,800 metric tons of plastic in total.



Sungai is largely funded through corporate sponsorships, whereby companies can get their logos onto a barrier. Bigger companies, including Corona and Marriott, are sponsoring entire “villages.”



[Photo: Sungai Design]



Once sorted, some plastics, like water bottles, are recyclable. Many others are not. Indonesia has a single-use plastic crisis. Adding to the tons of trash produced by tourists, there’s also an overuse of tiny sachets of everyday staples, from coffee, to instant noodles, to shampoo. Indonesians use about 5.5 million sachets a day of laundry detergent alone.



Sachets, many of which are made by Unilever, are popular in poorer countries because they’re cheap upfront. But they’re part plastic, part aluminum, making them hard to separate and recycle, so Bencheghib says they have to send them to landfills.



Then, there are plastic bags, about 10 billion of which Indonesians release into the environment every year. They account for 36% of the waste that Sungai collects, and are building up into “mountains of trash” in their warehouses. In order to reuse those bags, they decided to formulate them into a product for sale. The new offshoot company, Sungai Design, will engineer new upcycled products—starting with two lounge chairs.



The Ombak (“wave”) chairs are each made from 2,000 plastic bags. The team shreds and heat-presses the bags, which hardens them while keeping them malleable. They then precision-cut them with computer-controlled cutting machines. They’ll initially sell them in Indonesia at $800 apiece, likely to higher-income households at first, and aim to ship worldwide by the summer.



The manufacturing is happening at a slow pace, given the founders and staff are doing everything themselves. It currently takes 30 people to make one chair per day. But it can scale, given there’s no shortage of plastic. They’re aiming to introduce more durable products this summer; they don’t want to do smaller items like coasters or sunglasses, which tend to be temporary and just end up in waste streams again.



[Photo: Sungai Design]



And they’ll continue their Sungai Watch work. Despite the volume they process, they’re currently only present on two islands, Bali and East Java—and Indonesia has 17,000. “It feels like this is just a drop in the bucket,” Bencheghib says.



Scaling up looks promising given incoming funding. As well as the sponsor model, they receive donations online, and recently won $300,000 of unrestricted grants from the Elevate Prize, which supports social entrepreneurs.



Ultimately, the goal is to set up each village to be self sufficient within a few years. In each location, Sungai educates the community about better waste disposal—and about the economic benefits of buying bigger containers of products instead of sachets. Bencheghib says many local authorities are becoming more “receptive” to slowly introducing better waste management processes. “We really don’t want to be cleaning rivers for the rest of our lives,” he says. “Our mission is to be out of business.”