According to the report, more than 80 percent of plastic waste found in the ocean comes from land-based sources, including from landfills, because of improper dumping, poor locations, or lack of proper controls. More than half of the “land-based plastic-waste leakage originates in just five countries: China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam”.

Since then, the region, as well as each of the incriminated countries, has been struggling to solve the matter in order to prevent more plastic debris from polluting the ocean.

Such efforts eventually achieved a breakthrough four years later during a meeting of the leaders of the ASEAN member countries, when they declared their commitment to take concrete actions and strengthen regional and international cooperation to combat marine plastic debris.

The commitment was stated in a document entitled “Bangkok Declaration on Combating Marine Debris in the ASEAN Region”, which was produced during the 34th ASEAN Summit in Thailand’s capital of Bangkok on June 22.

The declaration was accompanied by a detailed guideline, called the ASEAN Framework of Action on Marine Debris, stipulating actions required to be taken by each member of the bloc both on national and regional levels. The framework comprises four priority areas, namely policy support and planning, research, innovation and capacity building, public awareness, education and outreach and private sector engagement.

On the national level, ASEAN nations are expected to, among other things, “engage the private sector in campaigns to resolve the issue of marine debris” and “develop and implement a long-term and robust strategy to combat marine debris, including having comprehensive waste management systems to prevent pollution and circular economy approaches”.

Meanwhile, on the regional level, the bloc is expected to establish a task force on the development of a regional action plan to ease communication between the countries over the matter.

The Foreign Ministry’s director for ASEAN socio-cultural cooperation, Riaz Saehu, said the work on regional-level actions was expected to complement actions done on the national level in each country.

“For example, Indonesia already has the 2018 Presidential Decree on Marine Debris, elements of which were included in the ASEAN Framework during the negotiation phase. Later, the implementation of both documents will complement each other,” he told The Jakarta Post recently.

The decree, signed by President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo in September last year, consists of a national action plan for 18 ministries to reduce marine waste by 70 percent in 2025.

Riaz added the implementation would be supervised through a standardized multi-level reporting mechanism from the ground up to the policymaker level.

The Nature Conservancy’s director of Indonesia ocean program, Muhammad Ilman, applauded the documents, calling it “a good beginning for a regional cooperation in combating ocean waste”.

“The implementation of such a framework is also important because we share our ocean with other ASEAN members, therefore making it possible for our waste to pollute each other too,” Ilman said.

According to an observation conducted by residents of Kulati village in Southeast Sulawesi with the Nature Conservancy from September last year to January, some waste found in the sea and beaches within the area of the Wakatobi National Park was identified as coming from Malaysia and Vietnam.

Meanwhile, environmental group Greenpeace criticized the documents, saying the bloc “has failed to resolve the problem of plastic waste from its root, because [both the declaration and the framework] are focusing on the waste management rather than the production of single-use plastic”.

“While offering innovation and alternatives [for the problem], the framework doesn’t carry a vision to develop a new system that is more than merely replacing plastic with another single-use materials. Governments of ASEAN members should develop “greener” innovation to facilitate a paradigm change on single-use plastic,” the group said in a statement.

A tangible example, it added, was for each nation to issue a restriction on single-use plastic, as well as a regulation facilitating a redesign of product packaging and distribution systems.

Both Ilman and Greenpeace also criticized the bloc for not including the matter of plastic waste imports on the declaration and the framework despite a recent brouhaha in the region regarding the matter.

A number of Southeast Asian nations were known to accept smuggled waste from countries in the Western hemisphere, such as the United Kingdom and Germany. Several countries, including Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia, had declared the smuggled waste would be returned to its points of origin.

Riaz dismissed the criticisms, saying export and import policies were in the jurisdiction of individual countries rather than part of the region’s collective interest.

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