Sustainability
Saving Paradise

Anna Moldenhauer: Gary, you have made it your mission to clean up Indonesia’s many waterways, particularly those on the island of Bali. Where did you get the idea?

Gary Bencheghib: I don’t think that people on the island of Bali can look away any longer when they see how the plastic pollution there is getting worse and worse every year. Every time it rains large quantities of plastic refuse get washed up onto the beaches. Back when I was a teenager, I asked myself how I could make a contribution to stemming this process. Even then, we would spend hours gathering up the plastic garbage which we then returned to be recycled. While doing this we noticed that most of the waste went into the sea. After all, these are points of contact with life on land. Accordingly, the objective was to prevent garbage from flowing out into the sea. In recent years, we have optimized the barriers we have developed together with engineers. It soon transpired that changing something is worthwhile. Despite the Covid 19 pandemic that broke out shortly after we established our company, we have now installed 180 barriers on Bali and Java and we use these to collect up to 3,000 kg of plastic refuse daily.

How does a typical working day at Sungai Watch play out?

Gary Bencheghib: If it has rained in the night, we initiate a kind of disaster operation, as we did recently with a river that runs straight through the village of Canggu. These cleanups can last up to five whole hours. When I don’t help with the cleanup process it is my job to guard our eight facilities in order to ensure that all the collected trash is properly recycled. In view of the huge mountains of material that we fish out of the rivers and mangroves this transformation process is existential as far as we are concerned. The plastic is washed, broken up, melted down, and pressed into panels. All this is relatively time-consuming. In parallel, we are conducting research into possible ways of recycling the plastics into something that has a value.

What challenges did you face before the plastic garbage could be reused?

Gary Bencheghib: The greatest challenge is cleaning the plastic – since we first launched the organization in total, we now have had 7 facilities to sorting before bringing it to our washing facility . To begin with, we used to clean the items manually in buckets as we did not have any financial resources available to us. Nowadays we can use motors and blowers which speed the process up and we have tried out various types of soap. Moreover, the water we use for the cleansing process is fully recycled in a full closed-loop system . Each and every kind of plastic requires cleaning in a different way and various methods need to be used in order to transform the plastic into a secondary resource. At the current point in time, we are not yet in a position to recycle all the garbage that we collect. Materials such as Styrofoam and polystyrene, multilayered bags and plastic packaging with tin foil on its insides cannot yet, for example, be recycled in Indonesia, so we have decided to store it in dedicated warehouses. Every day, we learn something new about treating all these kinds of waste differently. We don’t yet have an answer to every question, but we are working on this with various universities and hope that we will soon be cooperating with other research institutes as well. I think that the greatest challenge is that we only need a storm for one of the rivers that we have just cleaned up to become polluted again. What we are lacking here is state funding, that and a public awareness of the sheer scale of the problem. The war against plastic refuse calls for staying power and patience. We simply cannot give up on this.

During my research I noticed that you are already collaborating with creatives, as well as with hotels, places such as the Potato Head Studios and Marriott International. Amongst other things, this cooperation has resulted in sculptures and furniture made of recycled plastic. What will your next move be?

Gary Bencheghib: We have already worked with a number of design studios whose products take the plastic that we collect as the starting point for the solutions that they have dreamt up. We have also built our own facilities and conducted a large number of experiments aimed at finding the most efficient method for reusing the plastics. Over the past few months, we have been busy setting up another company aimed at using the plastic we have collected for designing our own furniture and objects – Sungai Design. We cannot wait to launch later this year.

At the same time as establishing Sungai Design you have already used the recycled plastic to build a “tiny house” that is 12 square meters in size. This is where you are currently living. Among other things, 3,500 plastic bags were processed to make the walls. How did you select the plastics for building this house?

Gary Bencheghib: I want this project to set a clear example, to show people that the plastic that is currently washing up on our beaches, that is jamming up our rivers or ending up in the garbage open dumps can instead be the starting point for a home. Most of the inside and outside cladding for my tiny house is made out of recycled plastic panels. The bedstead, the little kitchen and the bathroom also consist of recycled plastic. Furthermore, we have used plaited bamboo for the interior and recycled wood for the flooring. It is fantastic to see that the project has already been shared so many times on social media, because the point of the whole thing is to inspire people to realize that trash can be a valuable resource.

Did you collaborate with an architecture practice on the design?

Gary Bencheghib: The house is a very personal project and I accordingly designed it all by myself. At the moment, I am getting a large number of inquiries about how to take marketing the idea of the tiny house made of recycled plastic to the next level and that is definitely something that we are taking into consideration. However, before the project is ready to go to market, we would like to test whether the materials are fit for any eventualities, for instance, how the plates react to solar radiation or storms and whether there is any evaporation. We have been conducting the relevant tests for the past six months now.

I can’t think of any better practice run than to live for some time in a house you are hoping to market. For your power supply you can use solar energy – but how do you get hold of fresh water?

Gary Bencheghib: The house is located on a plot of land that is a long way away from any pipes or power cables, which is why there is neither a power supply nor any kind of conventional water supply. What we do do is to use solar energy to pump stream water through various bio-filters. Additionally, there is a collection facility for rainwater which is very helpful during the rainy season. The entire system is completely self-sufficient. My own yard –around 100 square meters in size and when I grow my own vegetables – is quite adequate for my basic food supplies. Quite apart from that, I can go surfing every day, because the property is right by the sea. I have now fulfilled one of my dreams. I live there with my dog and don’t need much more than that.

On your social media channels, you show clips of your cleaning up sessions where people can see the way you work in the polluted rivers, sometimes pulling the garbage out of the mangroves with your bare hands. Aren’t you afraid of hurting yourself or getting sick?

Gary Bencheghib: Perhaps we are at times simply naïve, or we simply rely on that youthful zest that says we are invincible. Of course, we aren’t. I was recently bitten by a mosquito, and it gave me dengue fever, which put me out of action for two weeks. Today, I fell off my standup paddling board into the river and had to shower several times to get all the toxins off my skin. Looking after my own health is one thing – the health and safety of our teams, on the other hand, that is something that does have top priority for us. We currently have a staff of more than 100 on Bali and Java. Instead of just tackling the symptoms, we are also attempting to address the heart of the problem and to deal with the open garbage dumpsites from which a large part of the refuse gets into the rivers. We are also currently setting up a waste management system, together with our partner companies, and are working at the communications-and-education level to create a greater awareness of the problem among the general public.

You also resort to unconventional campaigns to make people aware of climate change, campaigns such as your 4,800 km hike from New York City to Los Angeles. Why, in your opinion, are these lighthouse projects necessary?

Gary Bencheghib: I would say that the general public in Europe is largely more aware of what is currently happening to our planet than people are in developing countries. In Indonesia, you see people chucking their garbage away without further thought and polluting their environment with it. There is a yawning gap in awareness of the problem. There just aren’t measures to tell children in our schools about climate change and plastic pollution. These campaigns such as running all the way across the continent or using a boat made of plastic bottles to float down the Citarum River in West Java, one of the most polluted rivers in the world, are essentially a cry for help from us to the politicians and the companies to make them start doing something about the problem. These activities are a call for debate and are aimed at helping to get our decision-makers to start discussing a solution to the problem. This is why a large portion of our work also involves analyzing the data about the plastics that we have collected. We check what brands are responsible for the plastic garbage because this way we can see which companies are the largest polluters. Then we try to get involved in a discussion with them. In parallel, we push for taxation on plastic production on the part of the government and campaign for further measures by the politicians.

You have already received a number of awards for your commitment, and have, among other things, received the prestigious Ramon Magsaysay Award, which is considered the “Nobel Peace Prize” of the Far East. Even the Balinese government has given you its approval – was this a one-off thing or do you collaborate with the local authorities regularly?

Gary Bencheghib: Basically, what the question amounts to is why we have to clean up the rivers and why they governments do not come up with the idea themselves that this pollution is a problem. There certainly is enough interest and support, it is only important to make sure that this carries on in the long term and that the media awareness is not just a temporary phenomenon. We definitely need more hands on deck.

You grew up in Paris. Can you imagine passing on your idea to Europe at a later point in time?

Gary Bencheghib: Exactly, I was born in Paris and lived in that city until I was eight years old, when we moved to Bali. Since then, I have been living here and although it’s not hard to make out my French accent I do see myself more as Balinese. We definitely are thinking about expanding, but more into Southeast Asia. The most polluted rivers in the world are located in Asia. There is still a great deal to be done there before we can start thinking about Europe.

What will be your next move?

Gary Bencheghib: To stay active and try to inspire others. Plastic pollution will require all of our energy but I am positive that we can win this battle within my lifetime.