JAKARTA: Indonesia will start imposing a ban on single-use plastic products by the end of 2029, the country’s Environment and Forestry Minister Siti Nurbaya Bakar said on Monday (Jun 5).
By that time, manufacturers are also mandated to reduce their use of plastic packaging by 30 per cent.
Mdm Siti Nurbaya said the ban will include single-use plastic shopping bags, plastic straws and plastic cutlery while the use of styrofoams for food packaging will also be prohibited.
“This is a way to deal with packaging wastes that are difficult to collect, have no economical value, hard to recycle and have the potential to pollute (the environment),” the minister was quoted as saying by Indonesian news agency Antara.
Various studies and reports have named Indonesia as one of the top plastic waste producing countries in the world.
Last year, the country of 270 million people produced 12.6 million tonnes of plastic waste, according to data from Indonesia’s environment ministry.
Meanwhile, a study from environmental group Zero Waste Indonesia Alliance suggests that only nine per cent of plastic waste in Indonesia are recycled while the rest end up in landfills or polluting the rivers and oceans.