- Indonesia’s Supreme Court recently confirmed the bankruptcy of the country’s largest textile group, Sritex, which made garments for global fast fashion retailers like H&M.
- The court also awarded damages to 185 people in Central Java province who had filed a class action suit against a Sritex subsidiary over toxic gas leaks and river pollution.
- More than 10,000 Sritex workers lost their jobs as the heavily indebted firm collapsed, but local residents say the environment has showed signs of recovery since the subsidiary stopped producing synthetic fibers near Java’s longest river, the Bengawan Solo.
SUKOHARJO, Indonesia — Sarmi recalls the unusual blight that fell over Gupit village around 2017, when doves and finches appeared to vanish from the sky.
“With pollution that acrid and poisonous, there weren’t any birds or animals around — they all went away,” she told Mongabay Indonesia.
Life in this part of Sukoharjo, a subdued farming district on the island of Java, changed in 2017 when Indonesia’s largest textile group, known as Sritex, opened a factory run by one of its subsidiaries, PT Rayon Utama Makmur (RUM), to supply rayon fibers, also called viscose, to the global fast fashion industry.
RUM stopped operating in mid-2023, one of the early dominoes leading up to Sritex itself folding on March 1 this year after being declared bankrupt for missed debt repayments. Sritex had made uniforms for Indonesia’s military and supplied garments to high-street fixtures like H&M and Uniqlo. But sales at the group slumped from around $1.3 billion in 2019 to less than $850 million a year later as the coronavirus pandemic weakened consumer demand.
More than 10,000 workers lost their jobs overnight as Sritex stopped operating in March, after the cabinet of President Prabowo Subianto mulled a rescue for the country’s largest textile company, which had started out as a simple shop in the 1960s.
As officials in Central Java surveyed the collapse of the province’s biggest employer, Sarmi and 184 others celebrated vindication in court.
“Even my child’s vertigo, thank God, is gone,” Sarmi said. “He used to need treatment nearly every week.”
The shrikes and sparrows had fallen silent after the factory opened in 2017, she said, but the birds had begun to nest once again over Gupik village over the past two years.
A RUM do
Textiles and garments are traditionally seen as a step up the value chain from agriculture toward more productive manufacturing industries. But Indonesia’s textiles manufacturers are vulnerable to external factors like foreign exchange volatility, while many have struggled to recover from the pandemic.
Indonesian executives have long complained of Chinese exporters routinely dumping cheaper garments into Southeast Asia’s largest market, which could accelerate if the Trump administration maintains its high tariffs.
However, civil society groups have accused some firms of dumping their own waste into the Bengawan Solo River, the longest in Java, and several of its tributaries, along which Sarmi and hundreds of thousands of others live.
Sukoharjo district’s environment agency said in 2022 that a faulty wastewater pipe operated by RUM was effectively dumping pollution unregulated into the Bengawan Solo for around two months. A 2020 omnibus law on job creation and deregulation, the agency said, had removed the district’s ability to sanction RUM. Within a year of that finding, however, the company ceased operations, citing a class action lawsuit brought by local communities.
Manufacture of viscose fibers from wood pulp used by the fast fashion industry generates a witch’s brew of carbon disulfide gas that can leak into the air, as well as sulfuric acid and zinc, which companies often pump and dump into the nearest waterway.
Sarmi’s child used to fish in the Bengawan Solo for barb, catfish, perch and snakehead, important sources of locally available protein.
Anecdotal testimony among local fishers suggests the catch dried up not long after RUM started work eight years ago. Others complained the liquid waste contaminated local irrigation.
The textile industry is not the only source of pollution in the Bengawan Solo, also known as the Solo River, research shows.
“The Solo River, like many rivers worldwide, faces a pressing pollution challenge due to the increasing inflow of waste from various sources, including industrial effluents, agricultural runoff, domestic garbage, and plastic waste,” an international research group wrote in Marine Pollution Bulletin in 2023.
Since the factory opened in 2017, a community group calling itself Sumbu — short for Sukoharjo Melawan Bau Busuk, or Sukoharjo Against the Foul Odor — has documented air pollution from carbon disulfide gas in seven subdistricts across Central Java: Nguter, Polokarto, Tawangsari, Bendosari and Sukoharjo subdistricts in Sukoharjo, and Selogiri and Wonogiri subdistricts in Wonogiri district.
The RUM diary
Sarmi is one of 185 residents here who joined in the class-action lawsuit against Sritex’s RUM.
When the suit was heard in the Sukoharjo District Court in 2022, she traveled half an hour up the road to sit in the gallery.
“The process was long,” she said.
After losing in the district court, and then in the Semarang High Court, the residents appealed to the Supreme Court in Jakarta. In a decision published on Dec. 16, the nation’s highest court ruled that RUM had acted unlawfully by polluting the air and water.
Judges ordered the firm to pay residents 277.5 million rupiah ($16,700) in compensation for masks and medicine they had to buy for the toxic gas and cover medical bills worth 222 million rupiah ($13,400). The company also had to install and/or repair air and liquid waste-processing units, according to the ruling.
Slamet Riyadi, a spokesperson for the plaintiffs, said the damages won covered only 185 residents in a handful of villages, but that countless families had endured compromised mental health and loss of sleep for years due to the toxic gas.
Prior to filing the lawsuit, the community had petitioned local authorities to intervene, and demonstrated outside the district government office, Slamet said.
“Material compensation wasn’t the main objective — what we preferred was for there to be no more pollution,” he told Mongabay Indonesia.
Seems off
Slamet, the imam of the Al-Mukminin mosque in Pengkol village, said that many here worried company assets might only be mothballed and later revived under new management, perhaps bringing with it a return of the pollution.
The community had heard excuses and reverie from the company about new technology arriving to plug leaks in its waste pipes, he added.
“We’ve been giving them the opportunity to fix all this for more than five years so that there is no pollution, especially the toxic gas and putrid smell,” Slamet said.
The Supreme Court ruling requires RUM to conduct environmental restoration work, which will be overseen at a later date by the Sukoharjo district environment department, according to Muhammad Ikbal, a lawyer for the plaintiffs.
“We are living in peace now,” Slamet said. “Don’t disturb us anymore.”
“Now the cicadas are louder at night,” Sarmi said. “Outside there are dragonflies and butterflies.”
This story was first published here in Indonesian on April 25, 2025.
Citation:
Ismanto, A., Hadibarata, T., Sugianto, D. N., Zainuri, M., Kristanti, R. A., Wisha, U. J., … Abbasi, A. M. (2023). First evidence of microplastics in the water and sediment of Surakarta city river basin, Indonesia. Marine Pollution Bulletin, 196, 115677. doi:10.1016/j.marpolbul.2023.115677
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