The strategic step that Indonesia has taken is stipulated in Presidential Regulation No. 97/2017 on the national policy and strategy for the management of household and other kinds
of waste.

In achieving the target, the active role of the city/regency administrations is strongly demanded. The principle of managing waste known as reduce, reuse and recycle (3R) is crucial to slash the waste, with the target set at 30 percent in 2025.

The 3R activities have been claimed to have adopted the circular economy (CE) approach.

Next, the local administrations are responsible for handling and transporting the waste to TPA, with the target set at 70 percent.

Through Environment and Forestry Ministerial Regulation No. 75/2019 on the road map of waste reduction by producers, the government has followed up the mandate enshrined in Law No. 18/2008 on waste management, which obliges producers to manage their post-consumer waste.

Local administrations, through regional bylaws or regulations, can ban single-use packaging for food and beverage service sectors and retailers.

But this is a tough challenge and will be difficult to realize, especially among the informal sector players, including traders in traditional markets and roadside food sellers who rely on single-use plastics, which do not have economic value in the recycling industry.

Efforts to reduce waste by redesigning packaging so as to make it more adaptive to the CE concept is commonly applied in the manufacturing sector. They completely embrace the CE concept by using a bottom-up approach.

In Indonesia, such an approach seems to be applicable only in large-scale manufacturing and brand name goods companies.

Some goods companies, such as Danone-AQUA, Tetra Pak and those in textile and apparel, have paved the way for a circular business model by designing products that are able to perform longer without creating waste/pollution, for example through reusable packaging; and by keeping the same materials in use through recyclability and use of recycled content within the product itself.

Learning from the success of applying the CE concept in other countries, this strategic program should involve various sectors and follow an integrated approach at the central level, which is likely to require a more powerful legal umbrella and a top-down approach, as China has done.

Recycling is the primary sector that European countries are well familiar with through which they adopt the CE approach.

In Indonesia, the recovery of waste with selling value for recycling is intensively promoted through the development of the semiformal sector, such as with the establishment of bank sampah (waste banks) and the development of material recovery facilities (MRF), which rely on the active participation of the community, besides being reliant on the informal sector as the primary collectors.

With regard to plastic waste, apart from accounting for only 25 percent of plastic packaging that has value to be recycled, the main challenge is the fact that primary collectors are not always readily available.

The existence of the bank sampah and MRF is highly strategic as long as they work well. The next obstacle is marketing the products of the recovery waste with selling value because the supply chain toward the recycling point is not always readily available, especially outside Java and Bali.

As a consequence, the collected materials will no longer be competitive on the economic scale. The key to the success of the program is bringing generators, collectors and recyclers closer to each other, which means shortening the supply chain in the CE concept and this way, closed-loop in the CE concept can be realized.

As such, some goods companies in Indonesia, which have taken the initiative to facilitate the formation of hubs between collectors and recyclers outside Java and Bali, need to enhance their role.

The CE concept was first introduced in Europe at the end of the 1970s, based on a notion that the economic system applied was inefficient and not sustainable. Industrial development has driven the exploitation of natural resources, which led to the increase in human consumption, which results in accumulated waste and trash, and other environmental damages.

In 2015, the European Commission started to adopt the Circular Economy Action Plan and in 2018, the commission issued a framework on the European strategy for plastics in a CE.

The CE can bring Indonesia toward more sustainable development that averts the excessive use of natural resources. And yet, a clearer agenda is highly needed to provide an opportunity for all parties to play their role under the highly expected clear and assertive regulation.

In coping with the urban waste problem, the underlying difference between Indonesia and Europe and other industrial countries such as Japan, Singapore and South Korea lies in the fact that they reached
100 percent in terms of the level of the waste collection and transportation service before the 3R or the CE principle was in place.

Besides adopting the 3R principle of waste management intensively, the right strategy involves improving the service to 100 percent, although eventually the waste ends up being buried in a TPA that has yet to operate well. At the same time, we gradually adopt the zero waste policy and boost the CE principle.

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Professor of environmental engineering and specialist in waste issues

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