$1 removes at least 0.66 kg (1.5 lbs) of plastic from rivers. That’s the equivalent of 35 plastic bottles or 70 plastic bags! 

This includes waste sorting and treatment, as well as community engagement activities – e.g. weekly community clean-ups and monthly outreach sessions.  These help change mindsets and cut plastic pollution off at the source. 

Sungai Watch’s costs are roughly on par with similar organizations that clean ocean-bound plastic, but are more expensive than door-to-door household plastic collection.

Sungai Watch was founded by siblings Kelly, Gary and Sam Bencheghib. They have been engaged in driving action to reduce plastic pollution for 10 years through their partner organization, Make a Change World.

They work with local community heroes in Bali – from Pak Nyoman, a Hindu priest dedicated to eliminating plastic candy wrappers in religious offerings, to Pak Bagi, who became a river warrior in the midst of COVID after working in hospitality. The majority of the full-time team started out as volunteers; see them here. 

The team’s passion and commitment for cleaning up the waters of Bali, their home, is clear.  They are one of the best leadership teams we’ve seen in the nonprofit space. They operate with the agility and effectiveness of the best social entrepreneurs, and their skills complement each other particularly well. In a short time, they’ve driven an impressive amount of change in communities and the government. 

Vision: “Protect & Restore Indonesia's Rivers”

Mission: “Remove ocean-bound plastics from 1,000 waterways in Indonesia”

As a young organization, they have yet to explicitly define their values, but through our interactions and the results they’ve achieved, we feel their implicit values are very strong and clear (see “Track Record” for details).

Sungai Watch’s barriers use the power of the river to collect waste, and the design is simple and efficient without any moving parts. The no-frills solution is robust and gets the job done. Removing plastics up-stream is significantly easier and cheaper before it hits the ocean.

At the same time, household collection of waste before it enters rivers can be even simpler and more cost-effective. Sungai Watch coordinates with local social enterprises that are focused on household collection (EcoBali and Waste4Change) to ensure they cover all potential leakage points. We believe that both types of solutions are needed until plastic pollution is stopped at the source.

We especially love Sungai Watch’s thoughtful and creative work to involve the local communities, which is crucial for sustaining long-term change.

Sungai Watch’s technology is built locally from off-the-shelf materials. These materials are easily accessible globally which means this solution could scale along a majority of polluting rivers around the world. Similar river barriers have been implemented and proven in many different locations around the world. 

As they scale up operations in a village, Sungai Watch sets up stations that are fully run and adopted by the local community. This has allowed them to expand quickly, and ensure local ownership of operations for lasting impact.

A few recyclables are able to be sold in the local markets, and Sungai Watch is constantly innovating to find new ways to upcycle the lowest-value plastic (see “Wisdom” section for more).

Sungai Watch is also starting to explore partnerships with big consumer goods brands to help them offset their plastic footprint. While it will be a while before Sungai Watch’s work can be fully funded by brands’ plastic offset credits, the organization has been thoughtful about engaging big brands and the government to make this happen.

Sungai Watch’s model of expansion, the ‘village model,’ is a powerful way to create self-generating capabilities. It sets up self-sufficient centers where local communities can take ownership of cleanup efforts with a sense of pride and responsibility. 

While Sungai Watch is engaging big brands to pay for plastic offsets to fund cleanups, Sungai’s operations don’t currently have a proven pathway to becoming financially self-sustaining.

“Reversal” in this case would mean plastic being removed, only to end up in the environment again, or a river barrier system breaking. 

Unfortunately, due to limitations in Indonesia’s waste management infrastructure, there is a risk of leakage back into the environment. This is a self-identified weakness – Sungai Watch is carefully monitoring it and is in conversation with regional governments about improving landfill infrastructure. The organization currently sends only very degraded plastic to landfill; read more here.

Sungai Watch is exploring other options to permanently eliminate the non-recyclable plastic, e.g. via energy recovery, in Java.  This is currently not feasible on Bali because the facilities do not meet Sungai Watch’s environmental standards.

Sungai Watch has recently been set up as an Indonesian nonprofit and as a 501(c)3 in the US under their umbrella organization Make A Change World Foundation. Sungai Watch will be releasing a yearly financial report moving forward (and we will update this score when they do). In addition, Sungai Watch will provide DDC with full transparency of expenses, sharing copies of the bills for every single expense for the project; they have also shared an example of this from a past project, as well as an average breakdown of costs per kg of plastic collected.

Sungai Watch’s annual Impact Report offers a detailed view into their operations and strategy, as well as their lessons learned and challenges. 

They also collect daily data and photo evidence to confirm each river barrier’s effectiveness and collection volumes. However, they are not currently using third party verification or another standard, verifiable, and transparent tracking system.

Sungai Watch has a QR code on each river barrier, which is scanned each time the barrier is cleaned, and before/after photos are added to that barrier’s tracking document.

They will provide monthly data reports with the weight of collected plastic from each site and photos. They will also occasionally share videos, stories and interviews!

Founded in October 2020, Sungai Watch is 2 years old. 

While it shows great promise, Sungai Watch is a newer organization that has not yet been tested over the long term. However, Sungai Watch’s parent organization, Make a Change World, was founded in 2009.

Sungai Watch has installed more than 173 barriers and collected more than 715 tons of plastic (as of November 2022), which get processed and sorted in 4 facilities. The organization is growing fast, installing multiple barriers per week (see a map here), and collecting over 1 ton of trash daily.  They’ve supported more than 315 community cleanups, which engage local communities and raise awareness of the need for river protection.

In three of Sungai Watch’s operating villages, local municipalities have enforced fines for dumping in rivers. Following their 2021 brand audit, Sungai Watch is in conversation with two of Bali’s biggest polluters about better packaging and recovery strategies.

Sungai Watch’s first barrier has been in the river since October 2020 and has been going strong and stopping plastic on a daily basis. Sungai Watch has seen some of the rivers they’ve cleaned start to recover, including fish returning to a river in Denpasar 7 months after a cleanup. 

The use of simple river barriers to stop plastic has been proven through many other projects (including another DDC campaign with Plastic Fischer, whose design inspired Sungai Watch).

While not yet formally defined, the team’s implicit values are clear: 

• Scrappiness: with a strong bias to action, they quickly imagine and try out new ideas.

• Engaging others in an audacious yet gentle and constructive way. They invite in stakeholders across all levels – from local community members to big brands – and are committed to bringing others along with them on their journey to solving the plastic problem.  

• Finding hope and utility in every piece of waste. Sungai Watch works to find a use for everything they collect - whether that’s partnering to upcycle flip-flops, or creating biochar from organic waste. Waste management after removal is a messy, hard, and thankless process; the team has jumped in with creativity and enthusiasm.

Sungai Watch’s big goal is to place 1,000 trash barriers to clean every river in Indonesia by 2025. 

An initial campaign with Dollar Donation Club will sponsor the setup of operations in a new village that will collect 100 tons of plastic over 1 year. This includes installing 15 river barriers and a sorting facility, as well as running weekly community cleanups and monthly community outreach sessions.

Placing 1,000 barriers will cost $10 million. 

The initial campaign with DDC to collect 100 tons of plastic will cost $150,000.

Yes; $1 removes 0.66 kg/1.5 lb of ocean-bound plastic from some of Indonesia’s most polluted rivers. 

This is a conservative average that covers all costs (including sorting and treatment) and averages out across locations. Across their operations, $1 removes between 0.5 - 1.25 kg of plastic depending on the site:

• For the first year of operations in a new village, $1 removes 0.7 kg of plastics. (This cost covers facility set-up and barrier installation.)

• From year 2 onwards in a village’s operations, $1 removes 1.25 kg of plastic.

• For mangrove cleanups, $1 removes 0.5 kg. (This is costlier because clean-up is manual, rather than using river barriers.)

Yes, $150,000 = 100,000 kg of ocean-bound plastics collected, sorted, recycled or processed in the safest manner available.

Sungai Watch has developed a thoughtful and rigorous process for monitoring the waste cleaned up and reporting back to donors. To document each cleanup of a barrier, Sungai Watch’s patrols use a QR code to record before/after photos every day, and weigh the total plastic collected. After sorting and drying the plastic, it is measured again to make sure measurements aren’t distorted by water stuck in the plastic. 

Sungai Watch doesn’t currently use third party verification, but is exploring it for the future.

Plastic pollution is a symptom of poor design in packaging and poor waste management. Sungai Watch is attempting to address both the root causes and the symptoms of the plastic problem. 

To tackle the root of the problem, Sungai Watch changes people’s relationship with waste via community activations and cleanups. They also work with the government to drive legislation that curbs plastic production, extends producer responsibility, and establishes better waste management infrastructure. Finally, they engage the brands that are producing the plastic, using audits of collected plastic to hold brands accountable for their role in the plastic problem and invite them to be part of the solution.  

Cleaning up plastic in rivers and illegal dumps is an efficient way to intercept ocean plastic pollution close to the source. Once plastics enter the ocean, they are far more difficult to clean up.

Currently, recycling and processing of plastics do not allow for a self-sustaining economic model. 

However, this is something that Sungai Watch is actively working towards. New legislation has been passed in Indonesia that by 2030, consumer brands need to collect 30% of the plastic waste they produce. This means that brands are actively seeking out organizations like Sungai Watch to provide plastic offsets, and Sungai Watch has positioned itself to be a go-to partner for plastic removal. 

At the same time, Sungai Watch is constantly innovating to find new uses for the plastic that they collect (for more on this, see the “Individual Questions” section).

One of Sungai Watch’s biggest concerns has been the risk that cleanup efforts might remove pressure on the government to improve regulations and waste management. Because of this, the team has always worked in close partnership with the government. In areas where the government hires workers to clean up waterways, Sungai Watch coordinates cleanups with their troops.

River barriers are not permanent installments, so they can easily be moved if a river’s waste problem reduces and the barriers would be more effective in another location.  If better solutions emerge over time, the barriers can be decommissioned and fully recycled.

Sungai Watch’s ‘Village Model’ focuses on creating a hub for each village that includes river barriers, a sorting facility for the waste collected, community cleanup sessions and outreach programs. Each village has its unique set of rivers and streams, and localizing operations by village offers a sense of pride and responsibility to each community in order to ultimately change their relationship to rivers and waste.

“Through our weekly cleanup series, we have made river cleanup a fun, daring experience but it has become the pride of the Balinese. Many local communities continue to host cleanups in our name.”

Our vetting has uncovered no negative influences on indigenous populations.

Sungai Watch’s advocacy and awareness work aims to reduce plastic use and pollution - with the ultimate aim of cutting plastic pollution off at the source.  We believe that this is the most effective long-term solution to the plastic problem. 

In the meantime, plastics can take 450 years or more to break down in the ocean, and damage ecosystems in long-lasting and major ways. Once plastics reach the ocean, they become very difficult or impossible to remove. By removing ocean-bound plastics, Sungai Watch is preventing hundreds of years of environmental damage that these plastics will cause. 

Sungai Watch’s river barriers are designed to be effective for as long as possible, with minimal negative impacts on the environment. They can be easily relocated once they have effectively curbed pollution in one area; they can be repaired if an element breaks; and they are fully recyclable.

There are no known negative consequences on local wildlife. 

For 2 barriers, Sungai Watch received complaints of bad smells from animals (chickens, pigs, ducks) that had died previously and then been caught in the barrier. In response, they quickly moved the barriers to avoid any disturbance to the community.

In Sungai Watch’s early days, before they ran awareness campaigns, some communities saw the barriers as a cleanup service and thought it was okay to dump their trash directly in rivers, knowing it would be collected. As soon as Sungai Watch realized this, they organized meetings with the local governments to find effective solutions to regulate littering and open dumping. Because Sungai Watch carefully monitors the amount of waste collected by each barrier daily, they can quickly identify issues like this and take action.

Another trade-off that Sungai Watch has had to make is the decision to send degraded plastics to landfill rather than to energy recovery facilities. Because of this, they can’t guarantee that waste collected will never leak back into the environment.  A tricky trade-off, this is something that the team is actively searching for better solutions for. Read more here.

Sungai Watch’s big goal is to “Protect & Restore Indonesia's Rivers.”

The scale of this challenge is huge: Indonesia is the world’s fourth most populous country, and the second biggest source of marine plastic pollution after China. On the island of Bali alone, 1.5 million tons of plastic waste is produced every year, of which more than half is mismanaged: either openly burnt, thrown in a river, or left in an illegal landfill.

Cleaning up plastics once they have reached the ocean is an extremely complex and expensive problem, and Sungai Watch’s focus on rivers as a major choke point of plastics is an effective solution. 

One of the most challenging pieces of Sungai Watch’s work is stopping the source of plastic, before it is discarded. Sungai Watch conducts thoughtful audits of the plastics they collect to determine which consumer brands are producing the plastic. They use this as a way to raise brands’ awareness of the need to reduce their plastic production and take accountability for the waste produced. Their plastic audits have led to meetings, organized by the government, in which Sungai Watch presented findings to some of Indonesia’s largest corporate polluters. Sungai Watch has also been working with the Indonesian government to improve waste management infrastructure.

Sungai Watch has been creative about designing new ways to change communities’ behaviors around how they manage waste and care for their rivers. 

The organization is also testing out their first community-facing waste deposit system later this year at their Bali headquarters, to start to explore how incentives for “reverse vending machine” plastic collection might work. 

We love the boldness of the brand audits that Sungai Watch conducts: we believe that being able to identify and name the brands that are driving the plastic pollution problem has huge potential to drive rapid change at the source of the problem. 

Sungai Watch has also gotten creative in troubleshooting river barrier setup, testing different configurations and setups to best respond to the varying conditions like heavy downpours and sporadic thunderstorms.

A WWF paper on plastics and climate change states, “In our oceans, which provide the largest natural carbon sink for greenhouse gasses, plastic leaves a deadly legacy. It directly chokes and smothers a host of marine animals and habitats and can take hundreds of years to break down. As it does, sunlight and heat cause the plastic to release powerful greenhouse gasses, leading to an alarming feedback loop. As our climate changes, the planet gets hotter, the plastic breaks down into more methane and ethylene, increasing the rate of climate change, and so perpetuating the cycle”.

On top of this, the problem is getting worse: half of all plastics ever manufactured have been made in the last 15 years, and a recent study has shown that without immediate action, the amount of plastic entering the ocean each year could nearly triple by 2040.