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span class="caption" style="width: 339px;">JP/Prodita Sabarini In a factory in Cikupa, Tangerang, plastic resins are being blown into films of plastic, rolled, printed and chopped into plastic bags.

For years, people have started to realize the dangers durable plastics, made of hydrocarbons with more than 7 million connecting chains, pose to the environment. Sugianto Tandio, the president director of plastic bag producer Tirta Marta knows the issue well. “Plastic is so strong, microbes could only destroy it after 1,000 years,” he said.

As an heir of Tirta Marta, a plastic bag factory that has run since 1971, Sugianto realized that while he was producing a handy product that millions of Indonesian people used, he was also part of an environmental problem.

He then ventured into an unpredictable area: research and development. Beginning in 2000 as president director, he focused on developing an environmentally friendly plastic bag. It took him 10 years of research and development and millions of dollars to develop Ecoplas, his biodegradable plastic bag made of cassava and Oxium, an additive to regular plastic resin that quickens the degrading process. Both are patented under the company’s name.

Ecoplas plastic bags can decompose in 10 weeks, while plastic bags with Oxium, can be broken down in two years.

In Tirta Marta’s factory in Cikupa, Sugianto sat in a meeting room decorated with plastic bags. Local and foreign retailers, such as Indomaret, Hypermart, Zara, and Gap use Tirta Marta’s products. The firm supplies around 90 percent of the local plastic shopping bag market for major retailers. Further, Sugianto said two years after launching its eco-friendly products, the company was now exporting to 10 countries from Southeast Asia to the US.

For his innovation, Sugianto earned an award for innovation at the annual Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year contest.

The sales of Ecoplas and Oxium have grown by around 30 to 40 percent. Today, the company sells around 500 tons of Ecoplas and 3,000 tons of Oxium plastic bags a month. The demand for Oxium is so high that Tirta Marta has licensed the technology to 20 plastic bag manufacturers in Indonesia. “And the good thing is, they can use this without having to change their machines,” Sugianto said.

Sugianto said that marketing of the new product over the last two years had yet to recoup the investments made over the 10-year research process. However, Sugianto said that innovators do not chase after money. “The fact that my product is used in supermarkets and that it can help ease the problem of plastic bags is enough,” he said.

The oldest of eight children, Sugianto said that he was interested in research after his studies and work experience in the US. He studied at North Dakota University and worked for five years as an engineer for 3M, the company famous for their brand-name Post It notes.

He said that working at 3M really instilled a sense of innovation. “When I worked there one out of five working days we were set aside for nothing else but thinking,” he said. The company’s motto, he said, was to create something new every five years. This, Sugianto said, was because good products would always be copied by other people, and when they were ubiquitous, the price crashed. “That’s why we have to create something new all the time,” he said.

Sugianto returned to Indonesia in 1994 to help with his parents’ business. “It was difficult to readjust at the beginning, but I wanted to do something for the country. Indonesia is known for its rich resources, but we are still behind. We have to create and give added value to our resources to be able to improve the welfare of Indonesian people,” he said.

“That’s why I returned home.”

He focused on strengthening the company in the first six years of his return. And after that, in 2000 he was finally able to focus on the research and development aspect, setting up a team of five scientists.

Sugianto did not plan for the research process to last a decade. “In R&D, there’s a lot of unknowns. If the research can be completed a year, that’s good. If possible, in six months — the shorter the better — but you can’t predict these things,” he said.

His motivation to produce something significant from Indonesia, kept him going, he said. And he said that failure was a part of success. “It’s a process that leads to success,” he said. “The opposite of success is not failure, but never trying,” he said.

The “eureka” moment, he said, was not when the research team invented Ecoplas or Oxium, but seeing his products available for consumers.

Sugianto said that he was not just an innovator, but was more precisely an entrepreneur. “A lot of people are happy to have found something and patented something. But 97 percent of patents in the world are not applicable. They spent so much money. They found something. They patented it. So what?”

“The happiest moment is to see it in the market,” he said.

With Oxium and Ecoplas, his work was not yet finished, he said. As plastics are everywhere in everyday use, Sugianto said the firm was eyeing products for household applications. “We’re developing eco-friendly plastic cutlery at the moment,” he said.

”This is just the beginning,” he said.