World Cleanup Day 2026 opens in Banjarmasin with a bid to make ULM Indonesia's first zero-waste campus

A national campaign chooses Banjarmasin as its starting line

On 17 August 2026, Indonesia's 81st Independence Day, World Cleanup Day Indonesia and the Coordinating Ministry for Food launched a nationwide youth campaign, "Aksi Bebersih Pemuda-Pemudi Merdeka dari Sampah," at Universitas Lambung Mangkurat (ULM) in Banjarmasin, South Kalimantan. Deputy Coordinating Minister for Food Hanif Faisol Nurofiq opened the event in person, joined by ULM Rector Ahmad Alim Bachri, Banjarmasin Regional Secretary Ichrom Muftezar, the city's Environmental Agency, and World Cleanup Day Indonesia national leader Andy Bahari, according to reporting published on 18 August.

The campaign runs from 17 August to 28 October 2026, roughly ten weeks, under the hashtag #kami13juta, an appeal aimed at mobilizing 13 million young Indonesians into cleanup actions, waste sorting education and community organizing from campuses to coastal and rural areas. It sits inside the global World Cleanup Day movement, which this year counts participation from 211 countries. Students marked the Banjarmasin launch with a symbolic eco enzyme application to a campus waterway alongside the opening ceremony.

The pitch to ULM: become Indonesia's first zero-waste campus

Hanif's central ask of ULM went beyond a one day cleanup. He challenged the university to become Indonesia's first campus managing 100 percent of its own waste independently, telling the audience he expected a new student unit (UKM) and thematic community service program (KKN Tematik) focused on waste care to make this achievable in the near term. Rector Ahmad Alim Bachri responded by committing ULM to form that waste care student unit, describing the launch as what he hoped would mark the start of more structured waste handling at the university going forward.

The proposed model treats the student body itself as the delivery mechanism: rather than contracting out campus cleanup, ULM's students would be organized to sort, process and manage the university's own waste stream, with the student unit eventually representing the campus in coordination with the South Kalimantan provincial government on wider waste handling efforts. If it works, the pitch is that a public university with a large, organized, motivated student population can hit a source reduction target faster than a city government managing a more diffuse population of households and businesses.

Seven regulations, and the "three problems" a deputy minister says must be solved together

Banjarmasin's city government paired the ULM pledge with a policy commitment: seven new waste management regulations, spanning the full chain from upstream generation to downstream processing, and covering campus scale waste, the hospitality sector (hotels, restaurants and catering), fuel stations, 3R agents (the reduce, reuse, recycle processors that sit between households and landfills) and waste banks. Regional Secretary Ichrom Muftezar framed the effort as necessarily collaborative, telling the launch audience the city government could not manage the transition alone and would need support across sectors.

Hanif, for his part, named three obstacles he considers the substantial national barriers to better waste management: governance structures, processing systems, and public communication and education. His comment on the last point doubled as a call to the pentahelix model, the five way collaboration between government, academia, community, business and media, that the campaign is explicitly built around. Without coordinated public communication, he argued, neither governance reform nor new processing capacity delivers the intended results, since both ultimately depend on households and institutions changing how they generate and sort waste in the first place.

Why campus-scale pilots matter for the national target

Universities are a useful proving ground precisely because they combine a large population, a defined physical boundary, and an unusually high concentration of the demographic, students in their late teens and twenties, that national campaigns like #kami13juta are trying to reach at scale. A verified 100 percent independent waste management result at ULM would give South Kalimantan, and the national ministries behind the campaign, a documented, replicable case study rather than an aspiration, something other provincial universities and even city administrations could adapt using the same UKM and KKN Tematik structure.

That is also why the timing matters. The campaign's two month span carries it through the 20 September global World Cleanup Day itself and toward a planned national closing event on 20 October at Atma Jaya University in Jakarta, giving organizers a series of checkpoints to report interim progress rather than a single launch day that fades from attention. Whether ULM's own target is fully met by the campaign's end will be the clearest test of whether the pentahelix model Hanif described translates into a measurable result on one campus, before it is asked to scale nationally.

Choosing Banjarmasin as the starting point also carries a signal beyond South Kalimantan. National campaigns of this kind typically launch in Jakarta or another major metropolitan hub, where media coverage is easiest to secure. Opening in a provincial capital instead, with the closing event reserved for Jakarta in October, suggests organizers want the campaign's substance, a working student led waste system, tested and documented outside the capital first, rather than treating the regions as an afterthought once the flagship city programme is already defined.

Sirkularium's view

For government and public institutions, Banjarmasin's launch offers a template worth watching rather than replicating immediately: pair a national mobilization campaign with one concrete, boundaried, and measurable local target, in this case a single university's waste stream, rather than diffusing the effort across an entire city on day one. That sequencing lets a province demonstrate a full pentahelix collaboration, government policy, academic buy in, business sector rules for horeca and fuel stations, and public communication, at a scale small enough to actually manage end to end.

The metric worth tracking over the next ten weeks is not attendance at cleanup events, which is easy to generate and hard to sustain, but whether Banjarmasin's seven regulations are formally issued, whether ULM's waste care student unit is functioning with real waste diversion numbers behind it, and whether either becomes a reference other provincial governments cite when the campaign reaches its national close in Jakarta in October. Youth mobilization campaigns generate enthusiasm quickly; the harder and more valuable outcome is whether that enthusiasm survives contact with recurring, unglamorous tasks like sorting and hauling waste every week after the launch ceremony ends.