Companies must help reduce their own waste, activist says

Manufacturers should have more responsibility over the waste they produce, as well as the packaging they use, to help counter the city's increasingly urgent waste problems, an environmental activist says.

“Companies must engage in the practice of extended producer responsibility,” Maryanto, from the Friends of the Environment Fund, said Tuesday at a discussion on garbage management.

Extended producer responsibility calls for companies' active participation in reducing their waste, in the form of by-products or products that are no longer usable.

“Some companies teach people to make things out of the by-products, such as bags from plastic packaging, but they don't make sure that people actually buy those things,” Maryanto said.

Manufacturers’ active participation in reducing waste is also stipulated in the 2008 Garbage Management Law, for which bylaws and regulations have yet to be implemented. (dis)