The government is planning to force private companies to reduce non-environmentally-friendly plastic packaging by three percent and local governments to reduce waste generation by up to seven percent, an official said on Saturday.
Sudirman, assistant deputy for waste management at the Ministry of Environment, said the 2008 waste management law required private firms to take steps to reduce waste under the extended producers responsibility (EPR) scheme.
“We are still setting up the governmental regulation for this EPR. However, for private companies, especially those in upstream industries, three percent of their plastic packaging should be using environmentally-friendly elements,” Sudirman said on Saturday, two days before National Waste Care Day.
“[Three percent] is just an initial target to change plastic packaging to be more environmentally friendly,” he said. “It needs to be done immediately and there are a lot of technologies that they can use, (and they can) expand on the ‘3R’ concepts [reduce, reuse, and recycle],” he said.
Sudirman said there were plastics on the market that could degrade in three years, as opposed to the 300 years required for more conventional plastics.
Based on ministry data from 2007, at least six million tons of plastic waste were generated by 194 districts and towns across the country, accounting for 14 percent of the country’s 666,000 cubic meters of total waste.
The government is hoping the new regulation can begin to address the country’s waste management issues and help to prevent incidents like the 2005 landslide at the Leuwigajah dumping site in Bandung, West Java. The disaster, which claimed 147 lives and destroyed more than 60 homes, was the impetus behind the creation of National Waste Care Day.
Although Sudirman acknowledged that environmentally-friendly plastics were expensive, he urged all stakeholders to work together for a better solution to the refuse problem.
“The essential thing in EPR is that producers are to be responsible for what they have produced,” he said.
Sudirman added that six large corporations — Indofood, Unilever, Coca-Cola, Nestle, Aqua and Tetra Pak — had already stated their commitment to abide by the new regulation. However, the details were still being worked out.
Sudirman also said that stricter regulations would be imposed on local governments, demanding they reduce their total waste generation by seven percent.
He said the amount of garbage they produce could be decreased through the reduce, reuse and recycle scheme.
Berry Nahdian Furqon, executive director of the Indonesian Forum for the Environment (Walhi), said the targets were too minuscule to have any realistic impact on production methods or waste disposal.
