Recycling technology could be the solution to the plastic waste problem in Indonesia. How serious are we in dealing with this issue?

Plastic waste, which disproportionately pollutes the soil, air and water, is often considered the biggest enemy of the environment. Based on data from the Environment and Forestry Ministry, of 68.5 million tons of waste Indonesia in 2021, as much as 11.6 million tons, 17 percent, is plastic waste. Of that number, according to data from the Indonesian Movement for the Plastic Bag Diet in 2019, only a maximum of 9 percent can still be recycled.

In most big cities, waste originating from households, industry and from other places is dumped into landfills and piles up continuously like hills.

When recycled, though, plastic waste has an economic value. Ironically, the percentage of plastic waste processing in Indonesia is not yet maximized. In the city of Medan, North Sumatra, for example, the volume of waste amounts to around 2,000 tons per day, and only 30 percent of the total waste can be recycled, including plastic waste.

One of the reasons for this problem is because plastic recycling is still difficult to sustain due to a shortage of raw materials, namely plastic waste itself.

"This is ironic. On the one hand, there is a lot of plastic waste around us, but why is there a shortage of plastic raw materials for recycling? [This] shouldn't [happen], because plastic waste is all around us," Bobby Umroh, an engineer that creates machines for plastic waste recycling at Star Mesin, his workshop in Medan, told The Jakarta Post in early May.

He added that a number of people who ordered waste-recycling machines — plastic-cleaning machines and plastic choppers — on average faced the same problem: They found shortages of raw materials for plastic waste that could be processed.

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