At a supermarket in Jakarta, Diana Marsella loads her groceries into a canvas tote bag.
“I used to take plastic bags without thinking,” said the 39-year-old office worker. “Now I always carry reusable bags with me… It feels strange if I forget it.”
Editor’s note
This is the second of three articles in the Carbon crossroads series, which scrutinises Indonesia’s growing, carbon-intensive petrochemicals industry. The series brings to light the need to decarbonise the industry, examining possible solutions that could be adopted by policymakers, project developers and consumers. It also explores the pros and cons of China’s massive investment in Indonesian petrochemicals.
Read the first part here.
After the city’s 2020 ban on disposable plastic bags, their use in the city fell by 82% in the following months, said a Jakarta Environmental Agency official.
Similar bans were implemented across the country’s other cities and regencies from as early as 2016. However, this year a report by the NGO Dietplastik Indonesia found enforcement to still be lax.
At the same time, Indonesia is continuing to expand its petrochemical industry, as we saw in the first part of this series.
New and upcoming large-scale projects contain crackers that heat petroleum naphtha to create ethylene and propylene, building blocks for commonly used plastics. They are then turned into resins used in products like food packaging and bottles.
The industry’s expansion aims to boost domestic production of such building blocks, cutting reliance on imports. But environmental groups and experts say this growth increasingly clashes with the country’s waste reduction goals and climate commitments.
Most plastics are made from oil and gas through energy-intensive industrial processes that generate emissions from extraction, refining and manufacturing. Globally, petrochemicals is becoming one of the most dominant sources of oil demand.
Daily use plastics are expected to make up the bulk of demand up to 2050 in Southeast Asian countries and China, Japan and South Korea, according to a 2025 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) report. Experts Dialogue Earth spoke to say there is a need to tackle this demand rather than think of plastic as purely a pollution and post-consumer issue.
“Every plastic product carries a carbon footprint long before it is thrown away,” notes Herlina Agustin, an associate professor at Padjadjaran University in Bandung researching environmental communications. But “public awareness is still focused on plastic as a cleanliness issue, not as part of a larger fossil fuel and carbon system”.
She said greater awareness of plastics’ carbon footprint could help reduce consumption, but lasting reductions would require changes in policy, infrastructure and business practices.
“The biggest impacts occur when individual behaviour, public policy and industrial transformation move together,” she said.
Growing dependence and possible alternatives
Indonesia’s fast-growing demand for plastic is projected to reach 22 million metric tonnes in 2050, up from 8 million in 2022, according to the 2025 OECD report.
Rapid economic growth is likely to drive up consumption, including of plastic and plastic-intensive products, the report states. Indonesia’s population is also projected to continue rising while urban expansion shifts lifestyles toward consumption involving short-lived plastic applications, such as packaging.
By 2050, transportation and manufacturing sector expansion is expected to make up a big part of plastic demand growth. But everyday use plastics are likely to retain a dominant role in the total plastic demand across Southeast Asia and China, South Korea and Japan, at 61%.
For Indonesia, the percentage is unlikely to change much, according to the report. In 2022 it stood at nearly 60%, with 31% for packaging, 17% for synthetic textiles and 11% for household consumer products.
Substitute materials for making disposable goods such as packaging and single-use cutlery have been touted by some as part of the solution to tackling plastic pollution.
Franky Wibowo is head of marketing at PT Bersaudara Inti Corpora, an Indonesian company which supplies plastic raw materials for packaging. He said alternative materials often struggle to meet food safety and durability requirements for the cost, so many industries still depend heavily on plastic.
“For products that need strong protective barriers, especially food packaging, plastic is still cheaper, lighter and more durable,” Wibowo told Dialogue Earth. “A rice bag, for example, must withstand weight, transport and storage [requirements]. Many recyclable alternatives still cannot provide the same mechanical strength.”
South Korean company CJ Biomaterials has a facility in East Java manufacturing polyhydroxyalkanoates – biodegradable plastics made from bacterial fermentation of oils, sugars or food waste. Indonesian companies have also been producing biodegradable packaging made of crushed sugarcane stalks as well as cassava-based materials.
Elis Nurhayati is chief executive and co-founder of Daya Data Komunitas, a technology start-up focused on community management of local natural resources. She warns that replacing plastics with other disposable materials, such as crop-based bioplastics or paper, might shift the environmental burden instead of solve the underlying problem.
“Paper production can increase pressure on forests, while bioplastics may compete with food systems and agricultural land,” Nurhayati said. “The solution is not replacing one disposable product with another.”
Instead, the country could strengthen longstanding reuse systems many Indonesians are already familiar with, says Tiza Mafira, a co-founder of Dietplastik Indonesia and director of the Climate Policy Initiative. For Mafira, reuse is “the most realistic alternative”.
She gave the example of large refillable water dispensers and returnable cooking gas cylinders which have operated in Indonesia for decades. “That same model can be expanded for household products and food staples,” Mafira said. In Jakarta and other large cities, refill stores encourage customers to fill up on staples like cooking oil, detergent and household products using their own containers.
A 2023 study by the UN Environment Programme found that reuse systems could reduce plastic pollution by 30% globally by 2040.
Nurhayati advocates for reuse and says restricting plastic to applications critical for societal functioning would stem unnecessary use.
“If waste reduction is directly connected to economic incentives, people will change behaviour much faster,” she added. “Public pressure from environmentally and financially aware consumers could eventually force industries to decarbonise.”
Act of convenience
Consumers continue to rely on plastic packaging mainly because it’s cheap and convenient, said Hilaludin, co-founder of Yayasan Rumah Pelangi, a community-based environmental organisation.
“Even when consumers want alternatives, such as wrapping food in leaves instead of plastic, those options are often harder to find and more expensive,” he added.
Herlina Agustin of Padjajaran University said conventional plastics are artificially cheap because the price excludes environmental costs. “The public ultimately pays through pollution, waste and environmental damage,” she said.
The challenge is not only replacing materials, but changing systems of consumption, she said. “People may want reusable containers, but many places still do not support them,” she added.
Yet many of the solutions being promoted in Indonesia, including better waste segregation, reuse systems and alternative materials, focus on plastics only after they have been produced, said Agustin.
According to her, Indonesia’s environmental ambitions are difficult to reconcile with policies that continue to expand petrochemical production.
“As long as success is measured by ever-growing production and continuous expansion, we will keep looking for ways to make the same system appear greener,” she said. “What we may need is not only new technologies, but a different idea of what is enough.
“Environmental communication should not be about making reality look better than it is. It should help us have an honest conversation about the future.”
