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Group warns of hazardous plastic waste imports to Indonesia
Indonesia imported 283,152 tons of plastic waste in 2018, up by 141 percent from the previous year
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Elementary school students show off model airplanes they made using recycled plastic bottles in Malang, East Java, on Tuesday. (The Jakarta Post/Aman Rochman)
T
he Indonesian Zero Waste Alliance has urged the government to tighten its regulations on importing plastic waste following China’s recent move to restrict waste imports into that country.
For decades from 1988 to 2016, China absorbed 45.1 percent of global waste. The alliance has warned that Indonesia could potentially accept the waste now rejected by China, if the government does not implement and enforce strict regulations against imported plastic waste.
Based on Statistics Indonesia (BPS) data, Indonesia imported 283,152 tons of plastic waste in 2018, up by 141 percent from the previous year. The Chinese ban on imports of 24 types of waste material came into effect in February 2018.
“There is an indication that Indonesia is importing waste no longer accepted by China. Do not let Indonesia become other countries’ trash bin,” Mochamad Adi Septiono from the NGO BaliFokus Foundation said on Thursday on behalf of the alliance.
He added that Indonesia only processed around 8 percent of its own waste annually. “Why don’t we use our own plastic waste first?”
A study led by Jenna Jambeck of the University of Georgia in 2015 named China and Indonesia as the first and second-largest plastic polluters in the world.
China produces around 8.8 million tons of waste annually, with up to 3.5 million tons of it ending up in the ocean. Meanwhile, Indonesia produces 3.2 million tons of plastic waste, with around 1.29 million tons going into the sea.
