A 54-day monitoring by Indonesia’s largest environmental group around a waste-to-energy plant in East Java revealed frequent air quality levels breaching World Health Organization safety limits, raising concerns for public health. Indonesian NGO Walhi has recently published its findings from stationary and mobile monitoring of the air quality at five locations in the vicinity of the Benowo waste-to-energy plant in Surabaya city between November 2024 and January 2025. The results show exceeding safety levels of PM2.5 and PM10, which are tiny air pollution particles about the size of dust or smoke, which can slip into the lungs, with the former being so small it can enter the bloodstream and affect the whole body. “The most dramatic spikes occurred between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m., when the incinerator was running,” said Wahyu Eka Setyawan, the executive director of Walhi East Java. The Benowo waste-to-energy plant in Surabaya turns trash into electricity. Image by Petrus Riski/Mongabay-Indonesia. Inaugurated by former President Joko Widodo on May 6, 2021, the Benowo plant is Indonesia’s first and largest, processing 1,000 tons of waste daily to generate 12 MW of electricity. The facility houses two power plants: a 1.65 MW sanitary landfill system operating since Nov. 30, 2015, and a 9 MW gasification system that began running on March 10, 2021. Using data from AirBeam3 air quality monitor devices, Walhi found that the average PM2.5 concentration across all stations was 26.78 µg/m³, with the highest recorded level reaching 78 µg/m³. Meanwhile, at some stations, PM10 concentrations exceeded…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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