Tanoto Foundation Helps to Minimize Waste and Pollution

Known as a great businessperson, Sukanto Tanoto has deep philanthropic spirit and particular concern about the social issues in Indonesia. It is the reason behind the establishment of Tanoto Foundation, a nonprofit organization that aims specially to provide better educational services and assistance in improving social life of Indonesian people. Partnered with many government institutions and agencies, the RGE group founder and chairperson intend to deliver sustainable programs that much needed by the society.

Tanoto Foundation Recognizes the Importance of Environmental Sustainability

Mr. Tanoto understands that the business he runs also needs to value the environment. Recently, Tanoto Foundation organized training that helped the plantation workers of Asian Agri to have better household waste management. The program is one of the efforts to save our land from destructive pollution and to utilize waste to be recycled to become useful outcome.

The company under RGE group, Asian Agri, collaborates with a number of local smallholders to farm their land to produce palm oil. With more than 1 million tons of palm oil production capacity per year, the company is listed as one of the leading palm oil providers in Asia. With the Plasma / KKPA program, Asian Agri allows the local people to have better living by being employed by the company.

Waste Management to Help the Environment

We know that Indonesia is the largest country in Association of Southeast Asian Nation, and has the most population among the countries. The growth is increasing more than one percent every year, and we face more problems related to waste, as the result of growing number of population and industrialization.

This is actually reflecting the increasing urbanization, which results in increasing municipal solid waste every day. According to the World Bank’s prediction, by the year of 2025, the number of urban resident will have increased to more than 4 billion people; with municipal solid waste more than 2 billion tons. Managing such enormous number of waste requires enormous costs and efforts. As a developing nation, Indonesia faces bigger problems as we are still lacking infrastructure and government services.

In this sense, Asian Agri through Tanoto Foundation feels the importance of helping local communities to manage the environment better. The smallholders and employees are taught to sort the organic and non-organic household waste, following long-term effective practices based on the community. The program situates five waste dumping places, each of them aimed for different type of waste. If before the local people disposed their waste over the cliffs or just threw it carelessly, such practice no longer exists or has been significantly reduced after the program was initiated.