One of several conveniences people enjoy when eating out at a fast-food restaurant in Indonesia is the self-service condiment dispensers that provide a free flow of tomato and chili sauce — along with plastic straws.

Since Tuesday, however, this is no longer the case at any of the 630 outlets of Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) across the country, its general manager, Hendra Yuniarto, says.

“We’ve removed plastic straw dispensers from the condiment stands,” he said on Tuesday, noting that this was part of the company’s endeavor to reduce waste under the #NoStrawMovement campaign.

“We’ve been implementing the measure since April 2017, starting with six outlets in Greater Jakarta in the first phase, whereby we’ve reduced our plastic straw waste by 45 percent — hence the expansion to all of our restaurants,” he added.

KFC customers now need to ask the staff at the counter for a straw if needed.

“We can neither remove the straws nor eliminate the use of plastic completely at our restaurants. Somehow, there will always be people who need [the straws], and it’s also not easy to replace plastic from our packaging materials,” he explained.

Hendra said most of the waste produced at KFC restaurants comprised plastic and paper, while organic waste, like chicken bones and other food waste, accounted for less than 10 percent.

He claimed that the #NoStrawMovement had received acknowledgement from its global chain. KFC stores in several neighboring countries had been inspired to embark on similar attempts, such as in Singapore, Malaysia and Australia.

In April, a similar campaign against the use of plastic straws was held by cosmetics and body care company The Body Shop Indonesia to commemorate Earth Day. On April 22, during the Car Free Day event on Jl. M.H. Thamrin in Central Jakarta, the company deployed hundreds of its employees as volunteers to collect plastic straws from passersby and offered them ecofriendly alternative straw from paper.

“We succeeded in collecting more than 2,000 plastic straws in less than an hour,” said The Body Shop Indonesia CEO Aryo Widiwardhono, noting that the company had been campaigning for the antiplastic movement since 2013.

The 2,458 straws — each measuring 22 centimeters to form a line of 540 meters if put together — were brought to the waste bank Kreasi in Rawasari, Central Jakarta.

Divers Clean Action (DCA) founder Swietenia Puspa said she expected more consumer-based companies to follow such a movement to amplify the campaign to wider audience.

“While other types of plastic waste are recyclable, plastic straw waste has no value, so that even scavengers won’t take it. It’s made from polypropylene [PP] that is designed to last for hundreds of years,” she said.

The DCA is an NGO concerned about marine waste that frequently holds research, beach and sea clean-up activities and educates local residents about waste management, especially in the Thousand Islands regency of Jakarta.

“According to our latest observation in Thousands Islands, around 15.7 percent of all waste on Pramuka island alone is plastic straws,” Swietenia added, noting that many studies showed that plastic straw was the fifth-biggest pollutant in the ocean.

She went on to explain that people in Indonesia consumed 93.2 million plastic straws on average every day. That many straws would stretch a length of approximately 16.785 kilometers, which is almost the distance between Jakarta and Mexico City.

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