A Jakarta housing block turns its kitchen scraps into cooking gas

At the Rorotan public housing complex in North Jakarta — four towers, a few hundred families — food waste no longer heads for the landfill. A new community biodigester swallows up to 1.2 tonnes of kitchen scraps a day and turns them into biogas, while the leftover slurry feeds urban gardens. Since the digesters arrived, the share of households sorting their waste at the source has jumped from about 5% to nearly 90%. Less trash, cleaner cooking fuel, greener balconies — the circular economy, one tower at a time.