The management of solid waste, or garbage, is a major problem confronting big cities in Indonesia. As the urban population expands, and as people living in cities consume more, cities produce more rubbish. Managing this garbage is fundamentally a responsibility of district-level governments, and there has been little in the way of nationwide initiatives or systematic strategies to deal with the problem. In towns and cities around the country, many residents continue to dump their garbage on the street, burn it or throw it into waterways, contributing to other problems such as air pollution and urban flooding. Community and city-organised garbage collection, meanwhile, ends up in ever-growing mountainous and insanitary landfills that dot the countryside around urban centres.

For these reasons, it is important to look at success stories of cities that are managing to get on top of their garbage problems. One such case is Surabaya, the capital of East Java province. Surabaya is currently more advanced than most other cities in Indonesia in terms of waste collection, transport and landfill management. In 2019 and 2022, the city received the Adipura Kencana award, the highest rank in the Adipura award, which is given to cities that can maintain city cleanliness and urban environmental management (including sanitation and green open spaces) consistently and sustainably for multiple years (Maulidiya 2019; Pemerintah Kota Surabaya 2023). In 2021, President Joko Widodo visited the Benowo landfill (Surabaya's dumping site) to inaugurate the first waste-to-electricity facility (pengolahan sampah menjadi energi listrik, PSEL) in Indonesia. In addition, waste management in Surabaya has involved a large degree of community participation, through waste banks and community-based recycling centres.

How has this success been achieved? In this chapter, I argue there were three key ingredients. First, waste management reform in Surabaya required a long period of effort by the city government. A major turning point came in the early 2000s, but success was built on a long history of efforts to develop a waste management system that can be traced as far back as the Dutch colonial era in the 1920s. The Surabaya experience thus suggests that successfully governing waste requires long-term commitment.