Field work designing waste systems in coastal Indonesia. One of several threads in this practice. See the systems-change thesis.
Project STOP is a circular economy programme launched in 2017 by SYSTEMIQ and Borealis to design, implement and scale waste-management systems in coastal cities in Southeast Asia, with the goal of stopping plastic leakage into the ocean. It now operates in three Indonesian city partnerships: Muncar and Pasuruan in East Java, and Jembrana on the north-west coast of Bali.
I worked on Project STOP between 2018 and 2020 as part of the SYSTEMIQ team, based partly in London and partly in Bali. My contribution focused on three areas.
The Academy. I designed and built the Project STOP Academy, a knowledge-management system and training programme for the local teams running each city implementation. The Academy covered the full system in three modules: preparation (waste foundations, baseline studies, system economics, impact metrics), design and implementation (waste collection, sorting facility design, behaviour change, inorganics recycling, waste fees), and operations and maintenance. The output became the basis on which future waste-management leaders are trained to roll STOP-like programmes out to additional cities.
The Waste Management Game. I designed a serious game to teach the systems-thinking behind integrated waste management. The first version was a simulation modelled on the MIT Beer Distribution Game from the 1960s, intended to make visible how local optimisations in one workstream (organics, inorganics, collection) cause failures in others when the interdependencies are ignored. The game was later developed in collaboration with Kummara, an Indonesian studio specialising in serious-game design.
The digitalisation strategy. I led the assessment of how digital tools could support Project STOP across the three cities. The work started with vendor conversations (Gringgo, Let’s Recycle, mySMASH) and evolved through a Nestlé and Google innovation workshop in late 2019 into a broader framing of “STOP digitalisation” rather than “building an app”. The output was a strategy for a data platform aggregating baseline studies, operational data and impact data, with analytics in the short term and the potential for AI-based pattern-finding once enough cities and time periods accumulated.
Outcomes (public figures, source: SYSTEMIQ). Between 2017 and 2020, Project STOP brought waste-management services to 133,000 people across the three cities and kept over 1,100 tonnes of plastic out of natural ecosystems. The programme has since continued to expand, with additional partnerships and the involvement of Nestlé as the first food and beverage partner.
What made this project different from most ocean-plastic initiatives I had seen was the depth of the system design. Building a sorting facility is the easy part. The harder part is the governance, the financial sustainability, the behaviour change across thousands of households, the relationship with the informal waste-picker sector, and the slow institutional handover to the local government once the programme reaches operational maturity. The Academy and the digitalisation work were both attempts to capture that depth into reusable infrastructure.
For a longer methodology piece on how circular systems like this get designed from scratch, see Designing a Circular Economy from Scratch (which uses the comparable Seychelles fishing-nets case study).