Integrated Waste Management Facilities for Coastal Indonesia at Three Scales - Desa (village), Kecamatan (district) and Kabupaten (region): Technical Feasibility and Multi-disciplinary Virtual Scheme Design Collaboration

This IAPP programme addresses the urgent need in Indonesia on tackling plastic waste management infrastructure provision in coastal and rural areas. A vast share of the world’s ocean plastics pollution originates in Asia, with Indonesia accounting for the second highest share of mismanaged plastic waste.
The aims are to:
1. Bring together industrial and academic experts, with multi-disciplinary backgrounds, from the UK and Indonesia to enable a best-practice collaborative design process in a practical sustainable development context.
2. Propose a range of innovative sustainable engineering design and technology solutions, such as pyrolysis, for comprehensive integrated waste management facilities to serve rural Indonesia different scales, which can be used for learning and references by other communities across Indonesia. This includes implanting learned knowledge into creating waste strategies in Pangandaran, West Java – the project’s case location.
3. Launch a BIM design competition that enable academics, researchers, students and community partners in Indonesia to collaborate and practice engineering design techniques, in the applied context of solving the real and pressing civil engineering challenges with waste management infrastructure in Indonesia.

This project enabled us to carry out ongoing dissemination work in Indonesia, utilising the scheme designs and technical brief to inspire and inform local communities in creating better waste management infrastructure. It has helped in raising awareness among the local government and influencing future policy-making.

We were able to utilise the mentoring framework developed in our team’s previous IAPP programme to continue supporting the local community and empower them to manage their waste better. The project brought together different communities, stakeholders and experts from different disciplines to create unique solutions to waste management challenges in Indonesia. The output of the design competition has resulted in a genuinely realistic and realisable design solution, which was fed back into the local and regional government to aid them in the future policy-making.

By offering realistic visualisations of what a ‘Material Hub’ might look like, the design competition also gave an exciting vision on how a sustainable approach to waste and material management can be both beautiful and functional, and help turn people’s perspectives from ‘waste’ as the end point, into it being a ‘material resource’ in the middle of a continuous cycle.

The tourism planning and innovative socio-economic enterprise strategies that have been part of the student design competition can help local stakeholders in communities to understand there can also be an economic advantage to managing waste better and investing into waste management infrastructure. There has been many positive impacts on faculty and student engagement enabled by the IAPP programme.

A larger number of different faculties were brought together by the programme in order to derive holistic and real-world creative responses.

This is a Royal Academy of Engineering and Newton Fund funded project under the Industry Academia Partnership Programme 17/18