Paradise on the Brink: Bali’s Trash Emergency and the Push to Fix It

If you’ve spent any time in Bali, you’ll know the island has a trash problem.

The kind that clogs rivers, chokes gutters, and leaves the air carrying more than just the scent of incense.

And now, things are getting real.

After 40 years of swallowing everything from plastic straws to nasi campur leftovers, Suwung landfill – the mountain of waste south of Denpasar – is shutting its gates on organic trash.

Come December, the Balinese government has declared it’ll close for good.

Which begs the obvious question: where does all that food waste go now?

Enter Tobias, the Trash Whisperer

For Tobias Wilson, the Bali-based founder of Shiva Industries, the government’s move is bold, but necessary.

“Look, it’s very smart. We shouldn’t be landfilling organics,” he told Fabfit.

“Shutting it down with 24hrs notice was very extreme, don’t get me wrong, but the overarching theme of not landfilling organics is certainly the right way to go.”

Tobias is not your average garbage guy.

He grew up on a farm in Bendigo (in Victoria Australia for those unfamiliar), made his career in international advertising across Sydney and Singapore, then packed it in to move to Bali with his wife and three young kids.

What was meant to be a family reset morphed into a crash course in waste management.

“I just wanted to come and hang out and meet my family again after 20 years at the grindstone.

“You know, be a dad. I’ve got three young boys, so I didn’t come to Bali with a plan…just the plan sort of arrived.”

Two years later, he’s swapped working on campaigns for sneakers and laundry detergent for Bali’s daily mountain of banana peels, fish bones, and hotel leftovers.

Wait, It’s Not Plastic?

When people talk Bali trash, the mental image is usually plastic bags in rice paddies and beaches.

But Toby says the real monster is the stuff we don’t see.

“Organics are actually 72% of the waste flow,” he said.

Food waste globally produces 2.6 times the amount of greenhouse gases than the entire airline industry.

“So if it was a country, it would be the third highest emitter, behind the US and China,” he added.

The culprit isn’t just rot.

When dumped en masse, organics release methane – “the invisible boogeyman,” as Toby calls it.

It’s about 80 times worse for the climate than carbon dioxide.

Then there’s the leachate: the toxic brown soup that seeps through landfills, dragging nano particles from things like batteries, nappies, and needles into our soils, rivers and groundwater.

So yeah, a rotting banana is no big deal.

But a million of them? That’s how paradise gets poisoned.

From Trash to Treasure—In 24 Hours

Shiva’s solution is simple to explain, even if the science gets nerdy.

The machine looks like a giant stainless-steel barrel with a slow, steady churn.

Inside, microbes, oxygen, and heat work together in a process called “aerobic digestion.”

At its core, it’s biomimicry – nature’s composting process – but sped up, controlled, and optimised.

Where normal compost takes weeks or months, Shiva’s machines turn food waste into clean, pathogen-free fertiliser in just 24 hours.

You just plug it in and then put waste in, and get fertiliser out, explained Tobias.

“All the automations are built in and managed by my team, so all the operating team need to do on the ground is put waste in, take fertiliser. That’s it.”

The Westin Resort in Nusa Dua has been running the machine for over a year.

Staff there have watched previously barren gardens start to bloom, fed by fertiliser made from the hotel’s own food scraps.

Guests get a greener stay, management ticks its sustainability boxes.

And Bali’s landfills breathe a little easier.

“Not a Silver Bullet”

But Tobias admits Shiva isn’t the silver bullet.

Composting, black soldier flies, vermicomposting, and even DIY “kampong” buckets for households – all have a role to play.

“We need everybody, doing everything” he says.

But his company’s betting big on scaling across Indonesia, with factories planned for Java and beyond.

He knows some people will roll their eyes at another foreigner swooping in to “fix” Bali.

But for Tobias, this isn’t a vanity project.

He acknowledges struggling with the way some foreigners arrive in the developing world and immediately get upset that “it’s not like home.”

“I fully understand all of the challenges that we have in front of us here, in a lot of parts of indonesia we need to focus on the basics of food, water and shelter before we even begin talking about healthcare and education.. Waste management is further down that list and that’s ok, as long as it stays on the list”

“I think it’s super arrogant for anyone to come here as a foreigner and expect Bali to be at the same stage as more developed markets, for instance”

Why it matters for Bali

For tourists, Bali’s reputation is on the line.

Nobody books a yoga retreat to breathe landfill smoke. Nobody wants to pay a “waste levy” at the airport only to Instagram clogged gutters and rivers full of muck.

Tobias believes we have reached a point of no return, particularly in Bali, but also in Indonesia and Southeast Asia.

“The ramifications are not in 10 years, they’re here now.”

Landfill fires, water issues, extreme climate events…

It’s not just about keeping the island pretty for visitors, it’s about whether Bali can keep functioning.

By December, Suwung will shut completely.

No more dumping grounds. No more hiding the problem at the edge of town.

And paradise can’t stay paradise if it’s buried under its own leftovers.