Bali is drowning in waste. What drove this paradise island into crisis?

The Indonesian island of Bali attracts millions of tourists every year, enchanted by its legendary rice terraces, turquoise waters, and Hindu temples. Yet these breathtaking landscapes are overshadowed by piles of garbage covering the beaches. What happened to one of the world’s most beautiful islands?

More visitors mean more waste

Bali has been overwhelmed by the weight of its own popularity. For at least two decades, the small island has undergone rapid urbanization, accompanied by the dynamic expansion of holiday villages and luxury resorts. It looks stunning in travel brochures, but the reality is quite different.

Households and tourist facilities generate such enormous amounts of waste that managing it effectively has become a major challenge. Above all, the island lacks adequate infrastructure, while illegal dumping remains another serious problem. The Bahasa Indonesia news portal reports that in some villages, piles of garbage have already grown into mounds several meters high.

The situation becomes even more severe during the monsoon season, when torrential rains wash waste into rivers flowing through the island’s interior before carrying it to the coast. With more than 600 km of coastline, a significant share of this debris eventually ends up in the ocean. Ocean currents also bring additional waste from neighboring Indonesian islands. The beaches in the southwestern part of Bali, including Kuta, Legian, and Jimbaran, are among the hardest hit.

Bali without a waste management system

The waste crisis on one of the world’s most popular islands is not caused solely by the scale of consumption. An even greater problem is the lack of a well-developed recycling and waste management system. Existing landfills are often overflowing, waste separation is still uncommon, and open burning of garbage continues in many places.

Australia’s ABC reports that when local officials are asked about illegal dumps in villages, they simply move the waste elsewhere. Meanwhile, the Suwung landfill in southeastern Bali continues to grow and has already reached the height of a ten-story building. The Indonesian government has been trying to close the site for years because of the enormous amounts of methane released from the waste and the high risk of fires. The most recent blaze lasted nearly three weeks before it was finally extinguished.

As a result, residents are encouraged to deal with their own waste, which often means either burning it or abandoning it by the roadside.

A landscape that shocks

South of Denpasar, Bali’s capital, a huge pile of waste removed from a river has been left on open ground. In theory, it is supposed to be transported to a landfill, but even there it will not simply disappear.

According to Gary Bencheghib of the environmental non-governmental organization Sungai Watch, Bali’s waste crisis is largely the result of the widespread use of plastic. In the 1970s and 1980s, most waste was organic, and disposing of it in open areas was so common that virtually everything was wrapped in banana leaves, Bencheghib explains.

The habit of casually throwing waste behind people’s homes has remained, but today it has become a serious problem because almost everything is packaged in plastic. The Indonesian government hopes to address the crisis by building a waste-to-energy plant near the Suwung landfill. The project is expected to be completed within three years, but few believe it will be enough to save Bali.

A ban on single-use plastics is also expected to help, while the greatest challenge remains changing the mindset of the island’s residents. Unfortunately, waste separation and composting are concepts that are gaining support only very, very slowly. And Bali is running out of time to dig itself out from beneath its mountains of garbage.