About an hour from Indonesia's second-biggest city, Surabaya, the village of Bangun is being
swallowed by plastic waste.
In the front yards of homes on almost every
spare piece of land, piles and piles of garbage - sent here from all over the world including Australia.
Brought in by recycling companies which pay
the people of Bangun to help sort it.
Walking around it doesn't take long for the
Aussie brands to just sort of pop up out of the rubbish. They're so familiar and you just
can't help but think of everyone back home carefully separating their garbage, only for
it to end up here. It's just bizarre.
For the children of Bangun, it is just another place to play.
For their parents, it's a livelihood.
We're doing this for our children, to pay for their schools, to pay for all kinds of
expenses. The people here depend on this recycling business.
Supiyati has been sorting waste for eight years.
I found a gold tooth once. I sold it for $80!
She now employs four pickers who are paid
around $4 a day.
At regular intervals, trucks from the nearby
pulp and paper factory come to tip their loads.
Bangun's pickers get to work separating the
plastics. Whatever can be sold for recycling is tied
up in bundles and taken away. Anything considered worthless is brought to
the banks of the river and set alight.
We're exporting a bit more than four million
tonnes a year, on average and about 20 per cent of that is going to Indonesia at the moment.
Dr Joe Pickin uses customs data to track Australian recycling.
He says for years it has been cheaper for Australia to send it off-shore.
We've had a bonanza. Recycling has been so cheap. They have been paying us for our recycling
so well that it has been a bonanza for us financially, but now we have got to cope with
it, we'll have to pay a bit more. We are going to have to sort it more.
We are, in effect, exporting pollution.
Segung was born in Bangun and today is one
of the few people here not involved in the recycling trade.
He fishes well out of town these days, but wants to show us the spot where he used to
throw his nets.
Well, we've just arrived at this lake that
Pak Segung used to swim in as a kid and it just stinks, a really acrid smell that gets
stuck in the back of your throat. It is just no good at all.
Segung says the run-off from the factory which processes recycled paper has killed his
childhood playground.
When I was a boy, the water was clean in this
area. We could swim, play with our friends, it was all nature, but no one can play in
the river anymore because the water is polluted from the paper factories.
He believes all that plastic is making the town sick.
I can't tell you for sure if they actually died because of the pollution, but many of
my friends died young. The people in the cities of Solo and Yogyakarta,
they die of old age, but not here.
Microplastic is very dangerous for our body.
This is domestic waste because you can find a lot of the kind of plastic.
All the people of Surabaya drink from this river so there will be inside our body, our
blood. It has become a carcinogenic matter for us.
Since China closed the door on all imported waste, throwing the world's recyclers into
chaos, more and more plastic is being smuggled here among of shipments of paper.
So these businesses in China were talking all this stuff, they were sorting it out,
the residual waste management was poor, there was lots of pollution to do with this process
and although the businesses want it, the government has just said no, we don't want this anymore.
That sent it to other countries and now those other countries, they are starting to close
the doors as well.
Now, Indonesia has had enough.
This week, customs officers rejected 210 tonnes of Australian paper waste which was contaminated
with plastic, electronics, dirty nappies and other materials.
All eight containers are being sent back to Australia.
I think in the end, the appropriate response is to say, "Okay, well, sorry about that,"
and we have to start cleaning it up on shore. It is not sustainable. They don't want it
anymore. The writing is on the wall, even though it is still happening, we've got to
fix it up. So, has the whole world.
Very few we spoke to here want the rivers of recycled waste to stop.
Picking plastic, they believe, is their only shot at a better life for their kids.
It's important that my children don't end up like their parents. That's all I want.