From Trash to Treasure: How a Plastic Waste Donation Bank Is Changing the Way Mojo Thinks About Garbage

By: Laras Ardya Garini **Information Systems and Technology Student at Universitas 17 Agustus 1945 Surabaya Field Supervisor (DPL): Khoudiy Iffiyah, S.Ars., M.Ars.**

Promotional poster for the Plastic Waste Donation Bank program in RW 07 Mojo, inviting residents to rethink plastic waste not as garbage, but as a valuable resource for collective community benefit.

Walk through the alleys of RW 07, Kelurahan Mojo, Surabaya on any given morning, and you will notice something that feels painfully ordinarypp plastic bottles crushed on the side of the road, sachets tangled in the drain, wrappers left at the edge of the footpath. It is the kind of scenery so common in dense urban neighborhoods that most of us have stopped seeing it altogether. We pass it, step over it, and move onas if the problem belongs to someone else.

But what if the problem belongs to all of us? And more importantly, what if the solution does too?

The Plastic Crisis We Keep Ignoring Indonesia is one of the world’s largest contributors to marine plastic pollution. Surabaya alone generates thousands of tons of waste every day, and a significant portion of it is plastic the kind that takes centuries to decompose, that breaks into microplastics infiltrating our food and water, that clogs our waterways and chokes urban drainage systems season after season.

In neighborhoods like RW 07, Mojo, the issue is not that people do not care about the environment. The issue is that the infrastructure for caring has never truly existed. There are no convenient collection points. No incentive system. No visible pathway from “I have this plastic bottle” to “this bottle actually matters.” When the link between individual behavior and collective impact is invisible, behavior does not change no matter how many posters you put up.

This is the gap that a well-designed community program must fill. Not just awareness. Action.

A student representative from Universitas 17 Agustus 1945 Surabaya presenting the Plastic Waste Donation Bank initiative to residents of RW 07 Mojo during the Community Empowerment program.

Introducing the Bank Donasi Sampah Plastik On Saturday, June 6, 2026, students from Universitas 17 Agustus 1945 Surabaya as part of their Community Empowerment program officially handed over a Bank Donasi Sampah Plastik (Plastic Waste Donation Bank) to the residents of RW 07, Kelurahan Mojo.

The concept is elegantly simple, and that simplicity is precisely its strength.

Residents collect their household plastic waste bottles, packaging, wrappers and deposit them at a designated community collection point. Unlike traditional waste banks that operate on a purely transactional exchange model (bring waste, receive money), this program is built on a donation framework: the economic value generated from the collected and processed plastic is channeled directly back into communal needs. Think of it as a savings cooperative, except the currency is plastic.

The name itself carries a message Donation. The program asks residents not just to dispose of their waste responsibly, but to contribute it. The shift in framing from disposal to contribution is subtle but psychologically powerful. It transforms an act of getting rid of something unwanted into an act of giving something useful.

Why This Approach Works Where Others Have Failed Community waste programs are not new in Indonesia. Many have been launched with great enthusiasm and faded within months. The reason is almost always the same: they relied too heavily on goodwill alone without building a system that sustains itself.

The Bank Donasi Sampah Plastik model addresses this by embedding the program into the community’s existing social fabric. It does not ask residents to change their lives dramatically. It asks them to change one small behavior what they do with the plastic they were already going to throw away and connects that behavior to a visible communal benefit.

When people can see that their deposited bottles contribute to funding a neighborhood clean-up, or subsidizing a community event, or supporting a local family in need, the act of participating becomes meaningful beyond the transactional. It becomes gotong royong the Indonesian principle of mutual cooperation applied to the environmental crisis of our time.

The Behavior Change Beneath the Surface Perhaps the most significant impact of this program is not the volume of plastic collected though that matters but the shift in how residents perceive plastic itself.

Plastic, in the eyes of most households, is refuse. It has no value. It is something to be discarded as quickly and conveniently as possible. The moment you introduce a system that assigns value to it, you change that perception fundamentally. The plastic bottle on the kitchen counter is no longer just trash. It is a contribution waiting to be made.

This kind of cognitive reframing is at the heart of behavioral change research. People do not change habits through information alone. They change when their environment restructures the cost-benefit equation when the easier, more convenient, more socially rewarded option also happens to be the right one.

The Bank Donasi Sampah Plastik, by making plastic collection easy, communal, and purposeful, does exactly that. It redesigns the environment around the behavior rather than demanding the behavior change in isolation.

Field Supervisor (DPL) Khoudiy Iffiyah, S.Ars., M.Ars. highlighting the importance of long-term community participation and sustainability in ensuring the success of the Plastic Waste Donation Bank program.

A Model Worth Scaling What happened in RW 07, Mojo on June 6th is a small story with large implications.

If this model is maintained if the collection points stay active, if the community continues to see tangible benefits from their participation, if the next generation of residents grows up treating plastic separation as a normal household habit then we have evidence of something replicable. A template that other RWs, other kelurahans, other cities can adapt and adopt.

The challenge, as always, is sustainability. University students cycle through neighborhoods and move on. Programs that depend on their continued presence tend to dissolve when they leave. The true measure of this program’s success will be visible not in June 2026, but in June 2027 whether the bank is still operating, still receiving deposits, still generating value for the community, without anyone from the university standing in the room to remind them to do it.

That is the real work of community empowerment: building something that outlives the people who built it.

A group photo of RW 07 Mojo residents and the NR10 Community Empowerment team after the inauguration of the Plastic Waste Donation Bank, marking the beginning of a collective effort toward a cleaner and more sustainable neighborhood.

What We Owe to Places Like Mojo There is a certain kind of urban neighborhood that carries the weight of a city’s contradictions. Dense, dynamic, resilient, and chronically underserved. Places like RW 07, Mojo are not defined by their problems they are defined by the resourcefulness with which their residents navigate those problems every single day.

As a university student parachuting into a community for a semester, the temptation is to arrive with answers. The more honest and more useful posture is to arrive with tools and to leave those tools behind in the hands of people who know how to use them far better than you ever could.

The Bank Donasi Sampah Plastik is one such tool. What Mojo does with it from here is a story I genuinely cannot wait to read.

This Community Empowerment program in Mojo was carried out by Non-Regular Group 10 (NR10) under the supervision and guidance of Field Supervisor (DPL), Khoudiy Iffiyah, S.Ars., M.Ars.