JAKARTA: Indonesia is importing growing amounts of paper and plastic scrap but remains ill-prepared to process the material, which is aggravating the country’s already immense waste problem.
Paper scrap imports rose by 6% to 3.24 million tonnes last year, while plastic scrap imports skyrocketed by 30% to 252,472 tonnes, Statistics Indonesia data showed.
To deal with the incoming shipments in a sustainable way, industry players and experts have called on the government to develop recycling industries as well as waste management infrastructure.
Saut Marpaung, chairman of the Indonesia Waste Entrepreneurs Association, said imported scrap always contained worthless residues that could not be processed.
“The waste-processing industry is deve- loping at a slower rate than the growth in the amount of waste in society,” he told The Jakarta Post, adding that the main problem with waste mismanagement in Indonesia was the minuscule public funds available for building a proper waste management system.
“This is a task that must be solved immediately by the Prabowo-Gibran government,” he added with respect to the incoming administration of president-elect Prabowo Subianto and vice-president elect Gibran Rakabuming Raka set to assume office in October.
The Environment and Forestry Ministry’s waste management director general, Rosa Vivien Ratnawati, said importers of nontoxic materials, including paper and plastic scraps, had to use all of the scraps as raw materials.
She underlined that the scraps had to be homogenous, sorted, not derived from landfills and not mixed with other types of scraps.
“A pre-shipment inspection will be carried out to ensure the impurities percentage is not more than 2%,” she said, adding that importers had to obtain a recommendation letter from her ministry as well as an import permit from the Trade Ministry.
Alaika Rahmatullah, plastics audit coordinator at advocacy group Ecological Observation and Wetland Conservations, said 60% to 82% of Australian paper waste shipped to Indonesia was not recyclable as it was contaminated with flexible plastic scrap, plastic layers or plastic packaging and was therefore piling up at illegal dump sites in East Java and elsewhere.
He suggested prohibiting entirely imports of plastic scraps as well as of waste and scraps of vinyl chloride polymers since these could not be recycled and may release dioxin when heated or burned.
“The government should stop plastic scraps imports, like China does. They stopped plastic imports, so now these scraps are shipped to countries like Indonesia and Malaysia.” — The Jakarta Post/ANN
