¹ Faculty of Law, Gadjah Mada University Faculty of Law, Yogyakarta, Special Region of Yogyakarta, 55281, Indonesia
² Non-Formal Education, Universitas Negeri Yogyakarta, Yogyakarta, Special Region of Yogyakarta, 55281, Indonesia
³ Faculty of Law, University of Indonesia Faculty of Law, Depok, West Java, 16424, Indonesia

Ira Sinta Azlina
Roles: Conceptualization, Methodology, Project Administration, Supervision, Writing – Review & Editing

Andre Arya Pratama
Roles: Data Curation, Formal Analysis, Validation, Writing – Original Draft Preparation

Moh. Hariyanto
Roles: Investigation, Resources, Writing – Review & Editing

Reski Hasan
Roles: Formal Analysis, Visualization, Writing – Review & Editing

Putra Ramadhan
Roles: Investigation, Validation, Writing – Original Draft Preparation

Nisa Gustiara
Roles: Data Curation, Resources, Writing – Review & Editing

Nur Fauzi Ramadhan
Roles: Methodology, Validation, Writing – Review & Editing

Hardin (1968) distinguished the depletion of a shared resource (taking from the commons) from its pollution (adding to the commons), arguing that under the second mechanism, a rational actor’s individual cost-benefit calculation will favor externalizing waste onto a shared space whose capacity is assumed to be free and ownerless. When the receiving jurisdiction has weaker monitoring capacity, this calculation becomes increasingly advantageous for the polluter, regardless of that jurisdiction’s formal territorial sovereignty.

Drawing on Wallerstein’s (2004) world-systems analysis, Martínez-Alier (2003) and Hornborg (1998) argue that the global capitalist economy systematically shifts biophysical burdens including waste, emissions, and ‘ecological debt’ from core countries to periphery countries. Givens, Huang, and Jorgenson (2019) note that a periphery country’s limited legal, technical, and diplomatic capacity is not incidental to this dynamic, but structurally makes it a rational destination for waste that wealthier countries do not wish to process themselves.

Law No. 32 of 2009 on Environmental Protection and Management (UUPPLH) is the principal criminal-law basis for environmental law enforcement in Indonesia. Table 1 sets out the verbatim text of seven articles relevant to the two cases examined in this study, quoted directly from the official consolidated text of the Law published by the legal documentation center of the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources (JDIH ESDM, 2009).

Based on the verbatim text of Tangerang District Court Ruling No. 1834/Pid.Sus/2020/PN Tng, PT Indonesia Toray Synthetics, a producer of synthetic fiber and resin located at Jalan Mochamad Toha KM.1, Karawaci, Tangerang City, was charged after hazardous and toxic waste (B3) was found stored outside the designated Temporary Storage Area (TPS) specifically, in an area adjacent to the company’s Fly Ash TPS and Non-B3 TPS (Supreme Court Ruling Directory, n.d.). The case file shows that the company essentially held a complete and valid set of environmental permits, including an Environmental Permit (2015), a Wastewater Discharge Permit (2015), and two Hazardous Waste Management Permits for temporary storage (2016), as well as a national-level Hazardous Waste Utilization Permit issued by the Ministry of Environment and Forestry in 2017 meaning that the charged offense was a location- and procedure-based violation within a waste management system that was, in essence, already licensed, rather than a total absence of permits (Supreme Court Ruling Directory, n.d.).

On 9 August 2021, a panel of judges found the corporation, represented by its Director of the Production Division, legally and convincingly guilty of dumping waste and/or materials into the environment without a permit as referred to in Article 60 in conjunction with Article 104 of Law 32/2009 (Supreme Court Ruling Directory, n.d.). The court imposed a fine of Rp300 million, with a provision that the company’s assets could be seized and auctioned if the fine were not paid within 30 days, and crucially an additional sanction consisting of an obligation to clean up the misplaced B3 waste, relocate it to a licensed storage area, and subsequently hand it over to a licensed third-party waste manager at the company’s own expense (Supreme Court Ruling Directory, n.d.).

The following reconstruction rests on the official statement of the Tangerang City District Attorney’s Office confirming payment of the fine in accordance with the court ruling (as reported by VOJ.co.id, 2023, and Koran Pelita, 2023), combined with Mongabay Indonesia’s 2019 investigative coverage of the case’s origins (Mongabay Indonesia, 2019a, 2019b). The complete primary text of the ruling could not be obtained through the Supreme Court Ruling Directory at the time of writing; this limitation is discussed further in the following section.

PT Advance Recycle Technology was established in January 2018 and obtained Bonded Zone status in Tangerang in March 2019 (VOJ.co.id, 2023). Following a request from the Tangerang Customs Office for a joint inspection of an imported plastic scrap shipment, the Ministry of Environment and Forestry (KLHK) declined to declare the shipment compliant (Mongabay Indonesia, 2019a). In October 2019, the KLHK’s Directorate General of Law Enforcement named two Singaporean nationals the company’s commissioner and director as suspects under Article 105/106 in conjunction with Article 116 paragraph (1) letter a in conjunction with Articles 118–119 of Law 32/2009, calling it the first-ever naming of a foreign national suspect under the UUPPLH specifically for unlicensed waste import (Mongabay Indonesia, 2019a). Nationally, the KLHK inspected 882 containers of plastic and paper scrap between April and August 2019, of which 87 containers of B3-contaminated plastic waste originating from Hong Kong, Spain, Canada, Australia, and Japan were found to have entered illegally (Mongabay Indonesia, 2019b), demonstrating that this broader pattern formed the context for this case.

According to the prosecutor’s statement, the investigation established that the company held neither a Producer-Importer Identification Number (API-P) nor an Import Approval (PI), both of which are mandatory under Law No. 7 of 2014 on Trade and Minister of Trade Regulation No. 31 of 2016, and that it failed to meet the 90-day re-export obligation set out in Article 19 of that regulation for B3-contaminated shipments (VOJ.co.id, 2023). On 15 December 2022, the Tangerang District Court found the corporation guilty under Article 105 in conjunction with Article 116 paragraph (1) letter a in conjunction with Article 118 in conjunction with Article 119, or alternatively Article 106 with the same accompanying articles, of Law 32/2009 (Tangerang District Court Ruling No. 1606/PID.B/LH/2022/PN TNG), and imposed a fine of Rp4 billion, which was paid by the company’s General Manager and confirmed by the Tangerang City District Attorney’s Office on 15 February 2023 (VOJ.co.id, 2023; Koran Pelita, 2023). No additional (non-monetary) sanction was reported in these mutually corroborating sources, and the final outcome of the prosecution against the individual suspects could not be found in the public record available for this study.

Figure 1 summarizes this comparison visually: Panel A places the two rulings on a timeline relative to China’s 2018 National Sword policy; Panel B compares the fine amounts in each case; and Panel C shows the presence or absence of a (non-monetary) remedial sanction alongside the monetary fine. Figure 2 then traces the law-enforcement pathway followed in each case, from initial administrative detection to the final criminal sanction, highlighting points of convergence and divergence between the two pathways.

Both cases are consistent with Hardin’s account of pollution as a reverse tragedy of the commons. In each case, the corporate actor’s cost calculation favored externalizing waste whether by storing it outside a licensed and monitored area (Toray) or by importing it without the documentation that should have required a compliant source (Advance Recycle Technology) onto a shared space whose capacity was treated as costless. The clean-up order in the Toray case represents a direct, court-ordered internalization of that externalized cost precisely the kind of ‘coercive device’ that Hardin argued was necessary because ‘the long-term costs of relying on conscience alone are reason enough to reject it’ as a primary regulatory strategy.

Only the Advance Recycle Technology case directly embodies Unequal Ecological Exchange in its cross-border form: a corporate management controlled by foreign parties, a Bonded Zone facility established just weeks after China’s National Sword policy, and waste originating from a range of wealthier trading partners (Hong Kong, Spain, Canada, Australia, Japan) all consistent with the biophysical transfer of ecological debt described by Martínez-Alier and Hornborg. The Toray case, by contrast, illustrates the domestic face of the same underlying logic: a foreign-affiliated producer generating B3 waste domestically and mismanaging its disposal, without any cross-border transfer element.

The most striking finding from this comparison is the inverse relationship between the size of the fine and the presence of a remedial sanction. If deterrence theory predicts that sanctions should be proportionate to the harm caused and the gain avoided, the larger cross-border violation should have received a remedial order at least as strong as the smaller domestic violation. The fact that this did not happen suggests that the application of the Article 119 remedial sanction in Indonesian environmental adjudication may depend more on case-specific factors (such as how easily a concrete remediation task can be identified, as with the on-site clean-up in the Toray case) than on a systematic policy that aligns the severity of the sanction with the scale of the violation.

• • Standardize the application of the Article 119 remedial sanction. Public prosecutors should demand, and courts should make a standard companion to any fine, a remediation order, licensing consequences, or corporate guardianship in every proven case of environmental dumping or illegal import not only when a concrete clean-up task happens to be easy to identify.

• • Improve public accessibility to the full text of rulings. The Supreme Court Ruling Directory succeeded in providing the full text of Case 1 for this study; consistent indexing and searchability across all environmental criminal cases, including Case 2, would substantially strengthen the evidentiary base available for future case study research and for public accountability efforts.

• • Reverse the burden of proof for waste classification at the border. Importers, rather than customs or environmental authorities, should bear the burden of proving that a shipment meets the applicable purity and classification standards before release, in order to reduce reliance on post hoc prosecution as documented in Case 2.

• • Publish consolidated case-level law-enforcement statistics broken down by sanction type. Reporting not only the number of prosecutions and total fines, but also the incidence of remedial sanctions, would enable the kind of proportionality analysis attempted in this study to be conducted systematically, rather than case by case.

Both cases were identified through institutional inspection environmental compliance monitoring by the KLHK in Case 1, and a joint KLHK-Customs inspection request in Case 2. Law enforcement in both cases therefore depended entirely on the capacity and initiative of government oversight bodies, with no visible role played by communities living near the industrial facilities and bonded zones where the violations occurred. This suggests that one potential complementary layer of detection remains underused, and Indonesian law in fact already provides an explicit basis for developing it. Article 65 paragraph (2) of Law No. 32 of 2009 establishes that “every person has the right to environmental education” as part of the right to a good and healthy environment, and Article 63 assigns the central and regional governments the duty to provide “education, training, guidance, and awards” in environmental management. Indonesian environmental law scholarship interprets this provision as covering non-formal channels such as outreach, information dissemination, and non-formal legal education, alongside formal education in schools, as part of a preventive strategy that complements repressive law enforcement (Solikin, 2019).

Table 3 summarizes this legal basis together with the types of non-formal environmental legal education already documented in practice in Indonesia. Expanding programs of this kind specifically to communities and workers around the Bonded Zone and industrial corridor (the same locations as both cases in this study) would not change the criminal-law recommendations above, but would address the detection gap that emerged independently from both cases.

A study of Community Learning Activity Centers (PKBM) under Law No. 20 of 2003, Article 26 paragraph (4), identifies three stages required for genuine community empowerment: the awareness stage (identifying needs genuinely felt by the community through dialogue), the knowledge-transformation stage (participatory learning, based on local potential, with a flexible schedule), and the self-reliance stage, in which the community applies and further develops what it has learned without further external encouragement. Evaluations of PKBM programs across various regions in Indonesia have found that many reach only the knowledge-transformation stage and fail to achieve genuine self-reliance (Lukman, 2021). Non-formal environmental legal education programs for communities around the Tangerang industrial corridor should therefore be designed to pass through all three stages, including a genuine awareness/dialogue stage to identify what the community itself has already observed about waste handling in its surroundings, rather than a single one-off information session, so that the program can function as a credible complementary layer to the criminal law enforcement examined in this study. It should also be noted, as broader regulatory context, that Law No. 11 of 2020 on Job Creation has simultaneously narrowed a number of formal-procedural public participation channels in environmental decision-making, such as the community’s right to object during the Environmental Impact Assessment (Amdal) process (Pambudhi & Ramadayanti, 2021) a shift that in fact makes community-level non-formal channels an increasingly important complement, not an increasingly irrelevant one.

The authors are grateful to the Indonesian Education Fund Management Institution (LPDP) for the support of their publication as a part of their scholarship program.

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