How Tomohon City is giving food waste a second life

Every day, the city of Tomohon produces 51.6 tons of waste, and for years, most of it has ended up in a landfill that was never built to cope. But in West Tomohon, Indonesia, one man is quietly rewriting that story. 

It was a clear afternoon in West Tomohon when Jemmy Makasala walked through the neighbourhood, stopping to check in on residents along the route he knew by heart. As a local community facilitator, Jemmy has spent years working alongside the people of this district, and on this particular afternoon, someone called him out from their garden, asking him to take a look at their plants.

Jemmy obliged, as he always does, offering practical advice on caring for the garden in Tomohon’s famously fertile volcanic soil. But his eyes were also drawn to something sitting quietly beside the front door: a composting bag.

He believes nothing should truly go to waste, turning food scraps into fertilizer and eco-enzyme while encouraging communities across Tomohon to reduce, reuse and recycle.

"We have around 60 composting bags in this district," Jemmy explained. "Each one is placed about 100 meters apart. This way, every resident can easily access a bag to dispose of their organic waste."

It is a modest number, but with nearly 70 per cent of Tomohon’s daily waste being organic, these small community solutions could make a meaningful difference.

A city living in its own waste

Tomohon is home to 205,448 people in North Sulawesi. Like many growing cities, its growth has brought opportunity but also waste. For years, that waste has piled up faster than the waste management system was designed to handle. 

For the families living near Tara-Tara, Tomohon’s main landfill, the problem is part of everyday life. The smell that drifts through their windows, the worry about what seeps into the water their children drink, and the quiet resignation of a system that wasn’t built with them in mind.

The landfill is struggling to keep pace. Leachate bleeds into nearby water sources. Uncontrolled decomposition sends methane into the atmosphere. "The city of Tomohon faced five main challenges in waste management," said Mayor Caroll Senduk, pointing to limited cross-sectoral coordination, disconnected stakeholders, a lack of framework for integrated waste management, unreliable data, and a gap between best practices and formal systems.

Bringing the city together for dialogue and solutions 

It is precisely these challenges that ASEAN and UN-Habitat set out to address. Through the ASEAN Sustainable Urbanisation Strategy (ASUS) Project – Phase II, UN-Habitat is working with cities across the region to develop integrated, community-centred approaches to urban issues, including waste.

ASEAN and UN-Habitat brought together 70 city officials, residents, and technical experts in Tomohon, not just to discuss the problem but to confront it honestly and collectively. A roadmap emerged, leading to the development of a joint technical proposal to scale what is already working on the ground: Tomohon’s Integrated Organic Waste Processing Facility (PPSOT).

Inside the PPSOT facility, where Jemmy is currently overseeing, organic waste is transformed into eco-enzyme and liquid fertilizer. The eco-enzyme, Jemmy explains, is surprisingly versatile: it can be used as a natural fertilizer to make vegetables grow larger. This material can also be transformed into a disinfectant and even used as an ingredient in soap production. Next to the facility, a demonstration farm shows how food scraps can become compost, enrich the soil and help grow food again. 

“I’m still experimenting with eco-enzyme. We provide it free of charge to anyone who wishes to use it. We’ve even sprayed it at the landfill to help reduce odours, a temporary measure to limit air pollution,” says Jemmy.

Crucially, Jemmy facilitated women's community groups to be actively involved, leading waste segregation and composting, and generating revenue by re-selling recyclable products. These earnings have then been put into community agriculture, youth engagement and education projects – and are just one way that grassroots urban-focused initiatives have been supported through ASUS.

For Jemmy, the initiative has real promise, but he is candid about its limits. The facility currently processes only a small share of the district’s organic waste, while market waste has yet to be integrated. Limited container capacity means the PPSOT operates only once every three days, and encouraging wider public participation remains a challenge.

"I refuse to use the word ‘waste’,” Jemmy adds, "because nothing should go to waste; everything can be repurposed." Jemmy sees a future where more containers, more composting points, and more community involvement would mean less waste reaching the landfill. 

A city reimagining its future

The ambition is not simply a cleaner Tomohon. It is a more connected one, where the people of the city are not bystanders to change. Where a resident calling out to Jemmy about their garden plants is also someone who thinks twice before leaving vegetable scraps by the roadside. Where the smell from the landfill becomes a memory, not a daily fact of life.

“If everyone in this community could manage their own waste, we would significantly reduce the pressure on the landfill, and perhaps even achieve a true zero-waste community,” concludes a resident of West Tomohon District.

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ASEAN Sustainable Urbanisation Strategy (ASUS) Project – Phase II 

The ASEAN project “Accelerating the Implementation of the ASEAN Sustainable Urbanisation Strategy Phase II” (or “ASUS Project Phase II”) implemented by UN-Habitat with support from the Australian Government through  the Australia for ASEAN Futures Initiative (AUS4ASEAN), aims to accelerate sustainable urbanisation practices by implementing the ASEAN Sustainable Urbanisation Strategy (ASUS) in secondary and intermediate cities.

Phase II continues to place ASUS at the centre of action for sustainable urbanisation in ASEAN whilst enhancing connectivity and activity for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the New Urban Agenda (NUA) across the region.

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This article was first published on the UN-Habitat site, 'A city rethinking waste: lessons from Tomohon' ,16 April 2026