Bima Arya, mayor of Bogor, West Java, said that the administration’s move to ban single-use plastic bags in traditional markets faced challenges in its public reception.

“Traditional markets pose a bit of a challenge with different economic and educational backgrounds of their users,” Bima said during a visit by the Canadian Ambassador to Indonesia Nadia Burger in Bogor on Friday.

“But the policy will keep going,” Bima said.

Burger met with Bima and Diet Kantong Plastik (Plastic Bag Diet) movement director Tiza Mafira to discuss the ban on single-use plastic in the city.

In December 2018, the municipality started the ban by implementing it in all modern stores. Bima said that the decision to start with modern retailers was because they were easier to regulate.

In December last year, Bima expanded the ban to select traditional markets, starting with dry markets, before eventually applying it in wet markets.

Recently, the municipal government started a cooperation with a telecommunications provider to allow residents to exchange their plastic-bottle waste with phone credits. The plastic-bottle waste is later used to make handicraft goods.

The administration has claimed that the plastic-bag ban has helped reduce its 2.5 daily tonnes of waste production by 10 percent.

Bogor Municipal Environmental Agency stated that plastic waste makes up 13 percent of the city's total daily waste.

The country’s single-use plastic-bag problem has received more and more attention. In 2019, a forum by the country’s largest Muslim organization Nadhlatul Ulama (NU) came to the conclusion that littering with single-use plastic bags was haram as it damaged the environment in both the short and long term.

Source:
courtesy of THE JAKARTA POST

by Theresia Sufa (The Jakarta Post)

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