Recycling and waste, where our guests build

01At a glance

02How AI is reshaping it

03Where the money is moving

04What governments are changing

1. Dec 2024
   India. The Environment Ministry told the Rajya Sabha that 2,614 plastic waste processors had been registered under the extended producer responsibility guidelines for plastic packaging notified in 2022, and that around 103 lakh tonnes of plastic packaging waste had been processed as per the centralised EPR portal¹⁶.
2. 2 Apr 2025
   Bali. According to law firm SSEK, the Governor's Circular Letter No. 9 of 2025 prohibits the production in Bali of single-use plastic bottled drinking water under 1 litre and requires waste management at source by offices, villages, businesses such as hotels, shopping centres, restaurants and cafes, schools, markets and places of worship¹⁷. A circular letter is not a regional regulation.
3. Apr 2025
   India. The Construction and Demolition Waste Management Rules 2025 require projects with a built-up area of 20,000 square metres or more and road construction projects to use processed C&D waste, with targets starting at 5% in 2026-27 and rising to 25% by 2030-31¹⁸. They also set extended producer responsibility targets for recycling waste from reconstruction and demolition projects of 25% for 2025-26, rising to 100% from 2028-29¹⁹. These are targets, not achieved rates.
4. Aug 2025
   Indonesia. The Ministry of Environment said it is working to reach 100% of waste managed by 2029, as set in the national medium-term development plan (RPJMN), and had instructed 343 regional heads to switch at least to controlled landfills²⁰. This is a target in a plan, not an outcome.
5. 10 Oct 2025
   Indonesia. According to law firm A&O Shearman, Presidential Regulation No. 109 of 2025 replaces tipping fees for waste-to-energy plants with a single revenue stream from PLN at a fixed feed-in tariff of USD 0.20/kWh for 30 years with no escalation, and makes regional governments responsible for ensuring at least 1,000 tons of waste a day²¹.
6. 27 Jan 2026
   India. New Solid Waste Management Rules were notified, replacing the 2016 rules from 1 April 2026 and making four-stream segregation mandatory: wet, dry, sanitary and special care waste²². Bulk waste generators, meaning entities with a floor area of 20,000 square metres or more, water use of 40,000 litres a day or more, or waste generation of 100 kg a day or more, must ensure their waste is collected, transported and processed in an environmentally sound manner²³.
7. Jul 2026
   Indonesia. Indonesia has set 2027 as the deadline for regional governments to phase out open dumping, Antara reported⁵. As of July 2026, the Ministry of Environment had monitored 388 landfills, with 273 receiving administrative sanctions, 231 ordered to discontinue open dumping and 22 ordered to cease operations²⁴.

05Trends to watch

06The problems our guests are solving

India

EP09Kunjpreet Arora · Angirus Industries

4,136,188.83 t

of plastic waste generation reported in India in 2022-23, compared with 3,360,043.45 tonnes in 2018-19, the Environment Ministry told the Rajya Sabha in December 2024²⁹

Officially reported generation, a different measure from the modelled pollution estimate at the top of this page.

150-500 Mt

a year of construction and demolition waste in India, as projected by the Housing and Urban Affairs Ministry in 2024, while the Building Materials and Technology Promotion Council put it at 100 million tonnes a year in 2018, Mongabay India reported³⁰

Estimates that vary widely, not measurements and not a trend.

Kunjpreet Arora says Angirus turns single-use plastic and construction rubble into Wricks, bricks shaped exactly like clay ones so masons need no new process. In the episode she explains how early pilots taught her that builders buy strength, cost and durability rather than sustainability, why damp-proofing became the property buyers noticed, and how the company is scaling from Udaipur to Bangalore.

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Indonesia

EP12Tobias Wilson · Shiva Industries

3,400

tons of garbage a day is Bali's estimated output, AFP reported in April 2026. Gadjah Mada University expert Nur Azizah told AFP that Suwung landfill received about 1,000 tons a day, had been over capacity for years, and that up to 70 percent of its waste is organic³¹

Bali's largest landfill, Suwung, was declared off-limits for organic waste from the beginning of April 2026, with limited disposal allowed as a temporary measure until the end of July, AFP reported on 30 April 2026³².

Suwung's status after July 2026 has not been confirmed.

23-48 Mt

of food a year is thrown away in Indonesia, or 115-184 kg per person, a loss estimated at 4-5 percent of GDP, according to a Bappenas study released in June 2021³³

A food-loss estimate from about two decades of data, not a count of collected waste.

Tobias Wilson says he spent nearly two decades in Singapore's advertising and digital-tech world before moving his family to Bali, where beach and river cleanups led him to aerobic digestion. He says Shiva's automated machines turn food and organic waste into soil within a day, against months for traditional composting, and that they now run across four Indonesian islands.

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