It’s Tuesday, and today we’re discussing Rekosistem, a cleantech company from Indonesia operating in the waste-management space. Founded in 2021 by Ernest Layman and Joshua Valentino, the company recently secured a $7 million Series A round led by Saratoga Investama Sedaya and K3 Ventures, with participation from AppWorks, Skystar Capital, Bali Investment Club, Orvel Ventures, and Michael Sampoerna Office.

Rekosistem offers several services, but the easiest way to understand the business is to break it into three parts:

Rekosistem serves both individuals and businesses, and its approach differs across those groups, so let’s get into the nuances.

For individuals, there’s a mobile app that maps 40 Reko Waste Stations and 600-plus Mitra kiosks in malls, campuses, and transit hubs where users can drop off their garbage. Reviews on the App Store even suggest you can schedule a doorstep pickup for a fee. Besides recyclables, Rekosistem handles those pesky multilayer plastics and organic scraps. Users can either pre-sort everything or hand over a messy mix—their choice determines how many rewards or fees stack up.

Once collected, the trash heads to one of 15 processing hubs for sorting. Customers don’t help with that step, but the app lets them track exactly how much plastic, glass, or metal they’ve diverted.

Commercial clients get a similar menu. Small shops can lean on the waste-station network, sell sorted waste back, or book recurring pickups. Bigger players can go further and sign up for Rekosistem’s Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) program—a three-layer package (collection, recovery, circularity) that helps firms hit waste-reduction targets and comply with regulation.

Right now, more than 90 000 households and 200-plus enterprises feed about 4 500 t of waste into the network every month, and 3 500 t of that moves through Rekosistem’s hubs.

All the recycled waste doesn’t go to…well, waste. In fact, just 10% is residue. From the get-go Rekosistem tried to create products from waste. In an older deck it mentions two products :

Both aren’t mentioned on the website today, however Rekosistem does buy used cooking oil, so the fuel business may be intact in some form.

One thing that definitely survived is Rekompos, a beginner-friendly composter.

I’ve written a lot about Indonesia, and it’s seems like every time I do, it’s some sort of an ecosystem play. That was the case with Eratani, Elevarm, and Banyu. Rekosistem is no exception. Maybe not a full-blown ecosystem yet, but it’s getting there.

First, vertically integrated business lines that cover the whole value chain. In Rekosistem’s we can clearly see that in the company’s product portfolio: it goes from collecting waste (i.e. initial inputs) to creating new products from the waste collected (i.e. reaching the end point of the value chain).

Second, and especially true in developing markets, an aggregation of not just demand, but also supply. It’s not truly an aggregator, since there are no network effects, but it is enabling more value creation in the industry.

The founders consistently hammer home that Indonesia’s waste industry is fragmented, and Rekosistem is fixing this by partnering with 600 local entities, including SME waste banks and informal pickers. As Ernest puts it,

When Rekosistem supplies recyclables in the categories a buyer needs, it earns revenue; when low-value or non-economic streams arrive (mixed residuals, organic scraps), Rekosistem pays partners to process them, with the cost ultimately borne by the buildings, households and neighbourhoods that already fund municipal waste services. Within that cost base, only certain streams—plastic, bottles, cardboard, paper, used cooking oil, cans, metals—carry economic value; those margins fund both the platform’s expansion and its household reward scheme .

These partnerships also unlock better cash flow for SMEs: instead of waiting to fill and ship a whole truckload once a month (and only getting paid then), Rekosistem’s haulers can combine smaller loads into shared pickups. That cuts their transport costs and speeds up their working-capital cycle.

On the consumer side, households earn RekoPoints worth Rp 800/kg for clean, sorted recyclables (plastic/paper) and 3,000 points/kg for used cooking oil—redeemable into e-wallets. If they hand over unsorted waste, they pay a fee.

On the business side, clients pay a fee for waste pickup, with fees likely differing depending on whether it’s simple waste collection or a more comprehensive EPR program.

Finally, Rekosistem sells its sorted commodities, like Rekompos.

Indonesia generates an estimated 7.8 million tonnes of plastic waste each year, of which nearly 5 million tonnes are mismanaged and over 1 million tonnes leak into the ocean. Today, the country is the world’s second-largest contributor to marine plastic pollution after China. This crisis isn’t confined to coastlines: local rivers Ciliwung and Citarum rank among the 20 most polluted rivers globally, both funneling vast volumes of trash from the Jakarta metro area into marine ecosystems.

The trash that hasn’t ended up in the ocean is often brought to Bantar Gebang, a landfill in Jakarta and one of the largest landfills in Asia. Every day it receives 6,500–7,500 tonnes of waste, meaning that just one landfill accounts for 32–35% of waste in the country. The dumpsite already has 45 million tonnes of waste lying and decaying. Bantar Gebang is so large that the waste there could power the whole of Jakarta for a year.

The country’s population is growing at 0.8% per year, and consumption is increasing at 5%. Neither helps with fixing the crisis. If everything stays the same, the situation will go from very bad to a calamity pretty fast.

The waste problem isn’t just a plastic problem. Indonesia produces 69 million tonnes of solid waste per year. There are between 600 and 700 recycling firms in the country, with a total capacity of 2.3 million tonnes—meaning that just 3.3% of waste can be recycled. Some waste doesn’t have to be recycled, obviously, but still. For plastic specifically, only 10–15% is recycled, while the other 85–90% ends up in landfills and water bodies.

A lot of the problem stems from access. Just 60% of Indonesia’s urban population has access to formal waste collection. A third of the plastic waste in the country is generated in areas without access to a recycling facility.

To confront this mounting crisis, Indonesia’s Ministry of Environment and Forestry issued Permen LHK No. 75/2019, the Roadmap for Waste Reduction by Producers. Under the plan, manufacturers, food-service outlets, and modern retailers must each submit and implement a 2020–2029 action plan to achieve a 30% reduction in waste sent to disposal by 2029, measured against a 2020 baseline.

Complementing this producer mandate, the government’s National Action Plan for Handling Marine Debris targets a 70% reduction in plastic litter entering Indonesian seas by 2025. In 2024, the Asian Development Bank approved a $500 million loan to strengthen the program: by the end of 2022, Indonesia was able to reduce marine pollution by 35% compared to 2018 levels.

Finally, by 2029, the government plans to ban single-use plastic. With packaging accounting for 50% of all plastic consumption in the country, this ban should definitely help move the cause along.

The company has executed well so far—its traction and $7 million raise show that—but scaling a physical network will become tougher: more partners to manage, more Reko Waste Stations to open, and tighter logistics. Waste management isn’t a high-margin field, so balancing expansion and profitability will be hard work.

Java, and Jakarta in particular, is the core market. Expanding to less-dense areas poses two problems: partnerships are harder to build, and lower population density makes batching collections costlier.

Although nowhere is it mentioned explicitly, it seems like the B2C segment isn’t that attractive for the company. Moreover, it probably spends more money buying sorted waste from individuals than it actually makes from those individuals.

On the one hand, the amount of waste generated in Indonesia is not going to meaningfully decline anytime soon. On the other, the government is pushing businesses to be more accountable for how they manage waste. So for Rekosistem, demand grows in both absolute (i.e. more waste) and relative (i.e. share of companies needing their services) terms.

This year Indonesia banned plastic-waste imports, so recyclers must source material locally—good news for a firm aggregating domestic supply.

Rekosistem reached 442% CAGR in 2024. And yes, when you start from a low base, relative numbers will look impressive—but still… impressive. In 2023, the company processed 5,500 tons of waste and served 20,000 homes. It now serves 90,000 and processes 4,500 tons of waste each month.

I feel like we need many more founders attacking problems like this one, and far fewer building software tools no one asked for. The real material impact for the world—you just can’t compare the two.