Five years ago, the beaches on Nusa Lembongan, a paradisal island half an hour’s speedboat ride from Bali, were pockmarked with the kind of rubbish that blights large stretches of Indonesia’s most famous tourist destination.
These days, Nusa Lembongan’s shorelines are squeaky clean and its once heavily-polluted river, home to an extensive system of mangroves, is pristine.
The turnaround has been credited in large part to the Lembongan Recycling Centre (LRC), a community-run facility that collects rubbish twice daily from businesses, homes and waste collection points on the island, and then sorts and compacts paper, plastic, metal and glass for sale.
Not only has the initiative increased environmental awareness among islanders, but it has also put a literal value on waste, giving residents a financial incentive to clean up their home.
“The mangroves were cleaned of metal, including old boat engines and motorbikes, when locals discovered the metal had value,” Margaret Barry, the Australian founder of the Bali Children’s Foundation, a non-profit that helps finance the LRC, told Al Jazeera.