I

've lost count of how many fad diets have popped up over the years. Yes, there's the Atkins, South Beach, Dukan, blood type and Paleo diets, but there are many others and some are seriously weird.

The worst I've heard of is the tapeworm diet, which involves swallowing a tapeworm so that it eats the food you eat before your guts can get to it. Yuck.

And then there's the sleeping beauty diet, where you sedate yourself and sleep off excess weight, since you can't eat while you are sleeping (thanks for that). Apparently Elvis was a fan of this one (although he hardly ended up as much of an advertisement for it).

And don't forget the chewing diet, where you can chew as much food as you like so long as you don't ever swallow it (sounds like a particularly sadistic kind of torture). Or the baby food diet, which lets you eat up to 14 jars a day of pureed peas or carrots (I can hardly wait).

Yes, I'll admit that ever since I became a teenager I've been on some weight loss regime or another. I've never been desperate enough to try any of these deeply wacky ways to stay slim, but you will understand why I was intrigued when I heard of the 'plastic diet'. Was this yet another loony fad diet or was there more to it?

It turns out it's a diet everybody should be on, whether they want to lose weight or not. And it's no fad. In fact, Joko 'Jokowi' Widodo, our new Jakarta governor, endorsed it in an appeal letter entitled 'Gerakan Diet Kantong Plastik' (The Plastic Bag Diet Movement) issued on June 3, two days before World Environment Day.

Yup, it's a 'diet' to save the environment from choking on plastic, specifically plastic bags. You see, we don't just devour plastic bags, we're addicted to them.  In Jakarta alone, one eighth of the 8,000 tons of garbage we produce daily is plastic waste, half of which comes from plastic bags. For the entire nation, the figure swells to a total of 4,000 tons of plastic each day. In fact, yearly plastic consumption is estimated at 100 billion bags, worth a total of Rp 11 trillion (US$1.1 billion). What a waste (pun intended)!

Jokowi's appeal for the plastic bag diet is related to two special occasions: Jakarta's 486th anniversary and the Jakarta Festival Great Sale. His letter calls for members of the Association of Indonesian Shopping Center Managers (APPBI) and members of the Association of Indonesian Retail Companies (APRINDO) to not give out plastic bags to consumers during the Jakarta Festival Great Sale, which lasts from June 1 to July 14. Instead, retailers should distribute reusable bags.

Hmm, too little too late? In fact, Jokowi is simply reviving a Plastic Bag Diet Campaign that started in early 2013 (see dietkantongplastik.info), in turn inspired by a 2010 campaign led by Greeneration Indonesia (GI ' see greeneration.org/) and Circle K convenience stores. The program was simply to ask customers if they wanted a plastic bag. Amazingly, Circle K used 8 million fewer plastic bags that year! No wonder Vanessa Letizia, program coordinator for the GI Plastic Bag Diet, wants to replicate it in other chain stores.

Lawyer Tiza Mafira did something different. He launched a Pay-for-Plastic campaign, an online petition on change.org calling for supermarket and hypermarket chains to charge for plastic bags. So far the petition has almost 7,700 signatures, although the practice has been implemented with mixed results. Four Carrefour locations in Bali and Yogyakarta successfully charge for plastic bags but when they tried to do the same in the Lebak Bulus branch in South Jakarta, it caused an uproar. The idea of having to pay ' even if only Rp 200 for a small plastic bag and Rp 400 for a big one ' was more than shoppers who had got bags free for decades could get their little minds around.

Feminists say 'the personal is the political'. Yes, but it's also environmental. Whatever policies government or shops have, it's really our personal and civic responsibility as citizens of Jakarta ' and the world ' to help protect the environment. It shouldn't just be something special to mark an anniversary. You wouldn't throw trash in your house's drainage pipe or sewage system for fear of clogging it, right?  Yet, Jakartans complain about the yearly deluge of water, forgetting the floods are partly caused by the (plastic) trash they throw away that chokes our waterways.

As Kermit the frog said, it's not easy being green. I separate my garbage, biodegradable from non-biodegradable and reduce, reuse and recycle as much as I can. But every day I suffer guilt pangs when I dispose of my kitchen waste, which I still put in the dreaded plastic bags. What else am I supposed to do? I tried making a compost bin, but all it did was attract rats. Suggestions anyone?

Just like any other diet, the plastic (bag) diet requires knowledge, awareness, motivation, will power and effort. Habits die hard and bad habits even more so. Try watching 'We live in a plastic world' (youtube.com). Hopefully it will alarm you enough to do something now.

So for a start, why not get a few plastic bag diet buddies and 'slim down' together? It sure beats swallowing tapeworms!

The writer (juliasuryakusuma.com) is the author of Julia's Jihad.