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Anti-plastic advocates call for details on plastic excise plan
The government first announced its plan to tax plastics in 2016, but it still has not been implemented because of the lack of regulatory clarity and industry pushback.
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A cashier packs goods into a customer's bag at a shopping center in Denpasar, Bali. The Bali administration on Dec. 24, 2018 banned single-use plastics, including plastic bags, styrofoam and drinking straws, to reduce plastic waste in the province. (The Jakarta Post/Zul Trio Anggono)
C
ivil organizations and other stakeholders have called on the government to come up with a clearer action plan for the excise tax on plastics, which was introduced nearly three years ago in an effort to reduce pollution and increase state revenue.
Plastic packaging is the only addition to the items subject to excise tax in the 2019 state budget. The government announced its plans to impose the tax last year, and that it expected Rp 500 billion (US$35.11 million) in state revenue from the plastic tax.
Also last year, actress Nadia Mulya led an anti-plastic movement that started a petition on change.org, encouraging the Joko Widodo administration to tax plastic packaging. The petition, which is still open, had garnered 494,000 signatures out of the targeted 500,000 by April 3, 2019.
Tiza Mafira, the director of Diet Kantong Plastik (Plastic Bag Diet), an NGO that opposes the distribution of single-use plastic bags, is also involved in the petition. She said that imposing a plastic tax would go much further than merely reducing the use of plastics, particularly single-use plastics.
“The plastic excise would result in more transparency in the plastics industry, such as production costs, and how it should be managed,” she told The Jakarta Post at a recent event. “Clear data [on this] will clearly show the nationwide impacts [of plastic use] and help in the policymaking process.”
On March 1, the Indonesian Retailers Association (Aprindo) revived another movement Tiza started, Pay for Plastic, which had fizzled out three years ago because it failed to generate any regulatory changes.
Pay for Plastic discourages customers from using plastic bags by charging from Rp 200 to Rp 1,000 per plastic bag. According to Aprindo, the majority of modern retailers in the association had implemented the movement.
