Walk of fame: Indonesian duo pave the way to success with recycled plastic roads

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Beach cleanup by Get Plastic and Rumah Hijau volunteers in Pramuka Island, Jakarta in September 2020. (Credit: Get Plastic)
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Updated 11 November 2020
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Walk of fame: Indonesian duo pave the way to success with recycled plastic roads

  • Novel solution arose from the need to tackle country’s mounting waste problem, Rebricks factory co-founders say

JAKARTA: A loud bang breaks through the silence at a small factory along a street in the southern suburb of Jakarta where three men run a paver block machine, the source of the noise, to produce six grey bricks per batch.

Several piles of bricks lie scattered on the floor of the Rebricks factory workshop. However, these are not made from clay or shale, but from recycled finely shredded plastic.

On the other side of the factory is a mountain of plastic waste covering a 1,000-square-meter area waiting to be shredded into pieces before being mixed with other elements to make the plastic paving blocks.

Rebricks co-founders, university friends Ovy Sabrina and Novita Tan, said the idea to create “a competitive product” arose from the need to do more with “rejected plastic.”

“We wanted to show that we could make a competitive product from rejected plastic and (not just) extend the life of the waste,” Sabrina told Arab News.

The duo spent a year and a half experimenting with various formulae until they finally nailed the perfect recipe and were “confident enough to start production” in November last year.

The process involves breaking down multilayer plastic – material used for packaging daily-use goods such as food, shampoo, detergent.

These types of materials are usually rejected by community-operated waste banks or recycling centers who find it difficult to separate the layers of plastic and aluminium, and are instead dumped in landfills and rivers, thereby polluting the environment.

“We do not want to create a new problem such as micro-plastic that will pollute the soil when our bricks broke,” Sabrina said.

Indonesia is the second-largest marine pollutant in the world, producing 3.2 million tons of plastic waste in 2010 with around 1.29 million tons of that ending up in the ocean, a study led by Jenna R. Jambeck from the University of Georgia in 2015 showed.

According to a report released by the Environment and Forestry Ministry in February this year, Indonesia’s plastic waste production has risen about 5 percent annually in the past 20 years, while 21 out of 34 provinces in the country have issued policies to optimize their waste management strategy and support a national roadmap for a zero-waste target by 2025.

In addition, 30 regional administrations have banned single-use plastic to encourage changes in public consumption and behavior.

Realising that change can only be made brick by brick, Sabrina and Tan said they soon got to work and took their proposal to members of Sabrina’s family who own the factory where Rebricks is now housed.

Today, Rebricks uses 88,000 pieces of multilayer plastic to produce 100 square meters of bricks and has been approved by Indonesia’s industry ministry’s Center for Material and Technical Product, the government body in charge of certifying industrial products.

Sabrina said that a paving block made using these bricks “can withstand up to 250 kg of weight per square centimeter,” making it ideal for use in parking lots, driveways or pedestrian sidewalks.

Similar initiatives have also sprung up across the archipelago.

In tourism hot-spot Bali, a community-led non-profit group named Get Plastic has launched a machine which turns plastic into fuel, offering a solution to Indonesia’s waste problem and its high dependence on imported fossil fuel.

“The next generation must no longer struggle to find a solution to end this waste problem,” Dimas Bagus Wijanarko, Get Plastic’s founder.

“We need to address it now so they will have the time to increase their competence, or even to find ways to live on the moon.”

Wijanarko said he began the research in 2014 to employ the pyrolysis technique and convert plastic into fuel.

He said the technology, which involves thermal decomposition of waste in the absence of oxygen, is “cleaner” than a waste incinerator which emits toxic gas during the process.

“Results of a lab test by Sucofindo (the state-owned inspection and audit firm) showed that our fuel has the same quality as conventional diesel fuel but with far lower carbon residue,” Wijanarko said.

Like Rebricks, Get Plastic focuses on using rejected waste such as noodle packages and plastic shopping bags as its primary materials, with each of its machines having the capacity to convert 5 kg of plastic into 5 liters of diesel fuel and kerosene within three hours.

The group is collaborating with other communities to expand the impact of the machine, including with the award-winning Rumah Hijau (Green House) community in Pramuka Island, Thousand Islands regency, Jakarta.

Rumah Hijau’s founder, Mahariah Sandri, said that the machine “has helped to reprocess significant amount of plastic waste” collected from households and the sea surrounding the island since it was installed in September this year.

“It is a great addition to existing activities at Rumah Hijau which had been limited to prolonging the life of certain plastics while the rejected ones continue piling up,” said Sandri, who won the prestigious Kalpataru award from the Environment and Forestry Ministry in 2017, for raising awareness of responsible waste management.

She said that such solutions, as well as improved waste management programs, were “much needed to tackle the rising volume of waste” in the area, especially after Thousand Islands regency being designated as one of the government’s 10 priority tourism spots.

Wijanarko said that the community is planning a trip to other islands that are on the government’s list.

“It will probably be the world’s largest trash cleanup activity: 10 people in vehicles fueled by plastic go on a more than 1,000 km journey to collect and recycle waste,” he said.


Northern Ireland hit by third night of violence but main flashpoint calmer

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Northern Ireland hit by third night of violence but main flashpoint calmer

BALLYMENA, Northern Ireland: Violence erupted in different parts of Northern Ireland for the third successive night on Wednesday, with masked youths starting a fire in a leisure center but unrest in the primary flashpoint of Ballymena was notably smaller in scale.
Hundreds of masked rioters attacked police and set homes and cars on fire in Ballymena, a town of 30,000 people located 45 kilometers (28 miles) from Belfast, on Tuesday night in what police condemned as “racist thuggery.”
The violence flared on Monday after two 14-year-old boys were arrested and appeared in court earlier that day, accused of a serious sexual assault on a teenage girl in the town.
The charges were read via a Romanian interpreter to the boys, whose lawyer told the court that they denied the charge, the BBC reported. Police are investigating the damaging of properties on Monday and Tuesday in Ballymena, which has a relatively large migrant population, as racially-motivated hate crimes.
Two Filipino families told Reuters they fled their home in Ballymena on Tuesday night after fearing for their safety when their car was set on fire outside the house.
A few dozen masked youths threw some rocks, fireworks and petrol bombs at police after officers in riot gear and armored vans blocked roads in the town on Wednesday evening.
Police deployed water cannon against the crowd for the second successive night but the clashes were nothing like the previous night that left 17 officers injured and led to five arrests.
Much of the crowd had left the streets before midnight.
A small number of riot police were also in the town of Larne 30 kilometers west where masked youths smashed the windows of a leisure center before starting fires in the lobby, BBC footage showed.
Swimming classes were taking place when bricks were thrown through the windows and staff had to barricade themselves in before running out the back door, a local Alliance Party lawmaker, Danny Donnelly, told the BBC.
Northern Ireland’s Communities Minister Gordon Lyons had earlier posted on Facebook that a number of people had been temporarily moved to the leisure center following the disturbances in Ballymena, before then being moved out of Larne.
The comments drew sharp criticism from other political parties for identifying a location used to shelter families seeking refuge from anti-immigrant violence. Lyons condemned the attacks on the center.
Police said youths also set fires at a roundabout in the town of Newtownabbey, a flashpoint for sectarian violence that sporadically flares up in the British-run region 27 years after a peace deal largely ended three decades of bloodshed.
Debris was also set alight at a barricade in Coleraine, the Belfast Telegraph reported.
The British and Irish governments as well as local politicians have condemned the violence.


US immigration officers intensify arrests in courthouse hallways on a fast track to deportation

Updated 12 June 2025
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US immigration officers intensify arrests in courthouse hallways on a fast track to deportation

  • The large-scale arrests that began in May have unleashed fear among asylum-seekers and immigrants accustomed to remaining free while judges grind through a backlog of 3.6 million cases

SEATTLE: A transgender woman who says she was raped by Mexican cartel members told an immigration judge in Oregon that she wanted her asylum case to continue. A Venezuelan man bluntly told a judge in Seattle, “They will kill me if I go back to my country.” A man and his cousin said they feared for their lives should they return to Haiti.
Many asylum-seekers, like these three, dutifully appeared at routine hearings before being arrested outside courtrooms last week, a practice that has jolted immigration courts across the country as the White House works toward its promise of mass deportations.
The large-scale arrests that began in May have unleashed fear among asylum-seekers and immigrants accustomed to remaining free while judges grind through a backlog of 3.6 million cases, typically taking years to reach a decision. Now they must consider whether to show up and possibly be detained and deported, or skip their hearings and forfeit their bids to remain in the country.
The playbook has become familiar. A judge will grant a government lawyer’s request to dismiss deportation proceedings. Moments later, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers — often masked — arrest the person in the hallway and put them on a fast track to deportation, called “expedited removal.”
President Donald Trump sharply expanded fast-track authority in January, allowing immigration officers to deport someone without first seeing a judge. Although fast-track deportations can be put on hold by filing a new asylum claim, people can be swiftly removed if they fail an initial screening.
‘People are more likely to give up’
The transgender woman from Mexico, identified in court filings as O-J-M, was arrested outside the courtroom after a judge granted the government’s request to dismiss her case.
She said in a court filing that she crossed the border in September 2023, two years after being raped by cartel members because of her gender, and had regularly checked in at ICE offices, as instructed.
O-J-M was taken to an ICE facility in Portland before being sent to a detention center in Tacoma, Washington, where attorney Kathleen Pritchard said in court filings she was unable to schedule a nonrecorded legal phone call for days.
“It’s an attempt to disappear people,” said Jordan Cunnings, one of O-J-M’s attorneys and legal director of the nonprofit Innovation Law Lab. “If you’re subject to this horrible disappearance suddenly, and you can’t get in touch with your attorney, you’re away from friends and family, you’re away from your community support network, that’s when people are more likely to give up and not be able to fight their cases.”
O-J-M was eligible for fast-track deportation because she was in the United States less than two years, but that was put on hold when she expressed fear of returning to Mexico, according to a declaration filed with the court by ICE deportation officer Chatham McCutcheon. She will remain in the United States at least until her initial screening interview for asylum, which had not been scheduled at the time of the court filing, the officer said.
The administration is “manipulating the court system in bad faith to then initiate expedited removal proceedings,” said Isa Peña, director of strategy for the Innovation Law Lab.
The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, did not respond to questions about the number of cases dismissed since last month and the number of arrests made at or near immigration courts. It said in a statement that most people who entered the US illegally within the past two years are subject to expedited removals.
“If they have a valid credible fear claim, they will continue in immigration proceedings, but if no valid claim is found, aliens will be subject to a swift deportation,” the statement said.
The Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review, which runs the immigration courts, declined to comment.
ICE has used increasingly aggressive tactics in Los Angeles and elsewhere while under orders from Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, to increase immigration arrests to at least 3,000 a day.
Tension in the hallways
In Seattle, a Venezuelan man sat in a small waiting room, surrounded by others clutching yellow folders while a half-dozen masked, plainclothes ICE officers lined the halls.
Protesters held signs in Spanish, including one that read, “Keep faith that love and justice will prevail in your favor,” and peppered officers with insults, saying their actions were immoral.
Judge Kenneth Sogabe granted the government’s request to dismiss the Venezuelan man’s deportation case, despite his objections that he and his wife faced death threats back home.
“I want my case to be analyzed and heard. I do not agree with my case being dismissed,” the man said through an interpreter.
Sogabe, a former Defense Department attorney who became a judge in 2021, told the man that Department of Homeland Security lawyers could dismiss a case it brought but he could appeal within 30 days. He could also file an asylum claim.
“When I leave, no immigration officer can detain me, arrest me?” the man asked.
“I can’t answer that,” the judge replied. “I do not have any connection with the enforcement arm.”
The man stepped out of the courtroom and was swarmed by officers who handcuffed him and walked him to the elevators.
Later that morning, a Haitian man was led away in tears after his case was dismissed. For reasons that were not immediately clear, the government didn’t drop its case against the man’s cousin, who was released with a new hearing date.
The pair entered the United States together last year using an online, Biden-era appointment system called CBP One. Trump ended CBP One and revoked two-year temporary status for those who used it.
Alex Baron, a lawyer for the pair, said the arrests were a scare tactic.
“Word gets out and other people just don’t come or don’t apply for asylum or don’t show up to court. And when they don’t show up, they get automatic removal orders,” he said.
At least seven others were arrested outside the Seattle courtrooms that day. In most cases, they didn’t speak English or have money to hire a lawyer.
A judge resists
In Atlanta, Judge Andrew Hewitt challenged an ICE lawyer who moved to dismiss removal cases against several South and Central Americans last week so the government could put them on a fast track to deportation.
Hewitt, a former ICE attorney who was appointed a judge in 2023, was visibly frustrated. He conceded to a Honduran man that the government’s reasoning “seems a bit circular and potentially inefficient” because he could show he’s afraid to return to his country and be put right back in immigration court proceedings.
The Honduran man hadn’t filed an asylum claim and Hewitt eventually signed what he called a “grossly untimely motion” to dismiss the case, advising the man of his right to appeal.
He denied a government request to dismiss the case of a Venezuelan woman who had filed an asylum application and scheduled a hearing for January 2027.
Hewitt refused to dismiss the case of a young Ecuadorian woman, telling the government lawyer to put the request in writing for consideration at an August hearing. Immigration officers waited near the building’s exit with handcuffs and took her into custody.


Putin says special attention should be paid to nuclear triad in Russia’s new arms program

Updated 12 June 2025
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Putin says special attention should be paid to nuclear triad in Russia’s new arms program

  • “Undoubtedly, special attention should be paid to the nuclear triad, which has been and will remain the guarantee of Russia’s sovereignty,” Putin says

MOSCOW: Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday that special attention in the country’s new arms program should be paid to the nuclear triad — land-based, sea-based and aircraft-launched weapons.
Putin’s remarks, broadcast on state television, were made at a meeting of senior officials devoted to the country’s arms industry.
“Undoubtedly, special attention should be paid to the nuclear triad, which has been and will remain the guarantee of Russia’s sovereignty and plays a key role in upholding the balance of forces in the world,” Putin said.
A total of 95 percent of weapons in Russia’s strategic nuclear forces, he said, were fully up-to-date.
“This is a good indicator and, in essence, the highest among all the world’s nuclear powers,” he told the gathering.


US judge says government must release Columbia University protester Mahmoud Khalil

Updated 12 June 2025
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US judge says government must release Columbia University protester Mahmoud Khalil

  • US District Judge Michael Farbiarz had ruled earlier that expelling Khalil from the US on those grounds was likely unconstitutional

NEW YORK: A federal judge ruled on Wednesday that the Trump administration cannot use US foreign policy interests to justify its detention of Columbia University student and pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, but said his order would not take effect until Friday.
Khalil was arrested on March 8 after the State Department revoked his green card under a little-used provision of US immigration law granting the US secretary of state the power to seek the deportation of any noncitizen whose presence in the country is deemed adverse to US foreign policy interests.
He has since been held in immigration detention in Louisiana.
Khalil was the first known foreign student to be arrested as part of Trump’s bid to deport foreign students who took part in pro-Palestinian protests that swept US college campuses after Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attack on Israel and Israel’s subsequent military assault.
 

 


Peanuts or almonds? Rice or millet? Planet-friendly grocery shopping choices go beyond cutting meat

Updated 12 June 2025
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Peanuts or almonds? Rice or millet? Planet-friendly grocery shopping choices go beyond cutting meat

  • Plant-based proteins like legumes, beans and nuts all boast a much lower climate impact

It’s one of the most impactful climate decisions we make, and we make it multiple times a day.
The UN estimates about a third of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, the main driver of climate change, come from food. That pollution can come from several links in the food supply chain: how farmland is treated, how crops are grown, how food is processed and how it’s ultimately transported.
Maybe you’ve already heard the short answer to minimizing your diet’s impact on the planet: eat more plants and fewer animals. The data backs up that suggestion. Emissions from meat-rich diets are four times higher than that of vegan diets.
But so much focus on meats overshadows many other food choices that also impact the environment and can contribute to global warming. Here is a look at other important grocery store decisions:
Proteins
Swapping one serving of chicken per day for beef cuts a diet’s emissions nearly in half. Ruminant animals such as cows, sheep and goats are the top drivers of emissions.
Those animals “are associated not only with nitrous oxide emissions, but they’re also related to direct methane emissions because they burp them up while they digest food,” said Marco Springmann, professorial research fellow in climate change, food systems and health at University College London.
Springmann said processed animal products have a higher impact on the planet, too: “You need 10 times the amount of milk to make one unit of cheese.” So — and this is true of most food groups — the less processed the food, the smaller the environmental impact.
Plant-based proteins like legumes, beans and nuts all boast a much lower climate impact.
Grains
The standout here is rice, and not in a good way.
“Rice uses a ton of water. It uses gobs of fertilizer. There’s flooded rice paddy fields, and that water actually breeds all kinds of bacteria, and those bacteria produce methane gas,” said eco-dietitian nutritionist Mary Purdy.
Purdy said the most planet-friendly alternative is just eating a bunch of different grains.
“The wheat, corn and soy world is very, very familiar to us because we’ve been seeing it. It’s been heavily marketed. When was the last time you saw a commercial for millet or buckwheat?” she asked.
Diverse diets, Purdy said, incentivize biodiverse agriculture, which is more resilient to erratic weather — a hallmark of climate change — and makes healthier soil.
Fruits and vegetables
When it comes to produce, minimizing impact is less about choosing between foods and more about buying based on the way that food was grown.
Conventionally grown produce “very likely is using pesticides, fertilizer, and maybe more water because the soil isn’t healthy,” said Purdy.
Purdy said organic labels, such as Regenerative Organic Certified, indicate those foods had a smaller climate impact when they were grown. The tradeoff is that organic food has a lower yield, so it requires more land use and is often more expensive.
Local and “in season” foods also have a smaller climate impact, but not just for one of the reasons you may be thinking of: emissions from international shipping. Every day, thousands of large ships transport goods, including produce, around the world, and the fuel they use is heavily polluting.
However, “it’s mostly those local emissions on trucks that are actually impactful, not the international shipping emissions,” Springmann said.
Also, food grown nearby tends to be grown in a way that fits with the local climate and is less harmful to the environment.
“We’re not trying to grow oranges in some place in a greenhouse,” Purdy said.
Butter and oil
Plants win out over animals, again. Vegetable oils are less impactful than butter or lard. Springmann also said tropical oils are healthiest in moderation, such as those from coconuts or palms, because they have a higher fat content. Plus, palm oil is associated with deforestation.
As for nut butters, almonds might be a great option for limiting carbon emissions, but they require a lot of water. One study out of Tulane University found that a serving of peanuts has an emissions footprint similar to almonds but 30 percent less impact on water use.
Don’t waste food
Throwing less food away might sound obvious, but roughly a third of food grown in the US is wasted.
Meal planning, freezing leftovers and checking the fridge before heading to the grocery store all help cut waste.
“The climate impact, the embedded water use, all of the labor and different aspects that went into producing that food, that all gets wasted if we don’t eat it,” Nicole Tichenor Blackstone, a professor at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University.