Tiza Mafira - Discarding Single-Use Plastic Dependency

You are a founder of the Gerakan Indonesia Diet Kantong Plastik, tell us a little bit about how you came to found the organization, and what its primary role is today.

I was sitting in my office at the law firm I used to work for and looked out the window and saw it would be a challenge for me to get home because Jalan Sudirman was flooded. This was 2013 and suddenly I just wanted to do something about it. I figured waterways must be clogged by waste and one of my pet peeves was that so much of that waste are things we don't really need anyway.

I had made it a habit by then to bring my own reusable bag to supermarkets and was frustrated at how simple it was but how nobody was doing it because cashiers practically impose plastic bags on us for free. So I created a petition demanding that plastic bags stop being provided for free, it gained a lot of attention, and along the way I connected with like-minded individuals and we decided to be serious about it and make an organization.

Less than a year after starting my petition, Gerakan Indonesia Diet Kantong Plastik was born. Today it has evolved from being a purely campaign-based organization into a policy advocacy organization, and I would say our primary role today is to drive tangible, measurable policies to reduce single-use plastics.

Bali has recently declared a ban on single use plastic, giving companies here a grace period to adjust to the new law. Will Bali serve as a test case for other islands in Indonesia, or could this simply be a Bali solution put in place because of the growing environmental movement on the island?

Well Bali isn't the first region in Indonesia to ban plastic. Banjarmasin, Balikpapan, and Bogor were the first three cities to ban plastic bags. But Bali is the first to enact a province-wide regulation, and the first to ban not just plastic bags but also plastic straws and polystyrene.

There was a lot of political will that successfully drove this regulation - from the new Governor I Wayan Koster. I was involved in drafting the law and it was clear from meeting with the Governor's team that he wanted it to be the most ambitious plastic legislation in Indonesia. What I love about Bali is that the Governor's ambition is matched by the people's readiness to adapt.

Bali's decades-long environmental movements have succeeded in making people aware of the issue and so there is relatively little push back, and in fact have come prepared with solutions (e.g. the beautifully woven baskets, bamboo straws, or handcrafted decorations that can be revived to replace plastics and Styrofoam). I think Bali could ultimately inspire the rest of the country by showcasing that alternatives to plastic are abundant and are "authentically Indonesian" solutions.

The ministry of trade and industry and the ministry of finance are allowed to enforce product standards and packaging guidelines onto producers such as Aqua Danone, Indofood, Nestle, P&G, Unilever, etc. What type of regulatory tools or financial mechanisms do you think could help to regulate Indonesia's biggest single use plastic producers?

Correction - the Ministry of Industry can enforce product standards and regulate plastic producers. The Ministry of Trade can regulate the bulk or retail distribution of plastics, and the Ministry of Finance can provide financial incentives to push initiatives forward. So far, only the Ministry of Finance seems interested in reducing plastic waste.

I had the honor of sitting in a meeting with Minister of Finance Sri Mulyani last year in Bali by the invitation of the World Bank, and after I told her about the success of plastic bag bans in Banjarmasin, she immediately came up with the idea to provide fiscal incentives to cities that manage to prove a measurable reduction in plastic waste. And she wasn't joking, because by the end of 2018, that regulation was ready and by 2019, Banjarmasin received 95 billion Rupiah.

That really got other cities, including Bali, stoked and enthusiastic about reducing plastics. Governor I Wayan Koster publicly mentioned this fiscal incentive as one of the primary drivers of his decision to sign off on the plastics ban. The Ministry of Finance is also working on a plastic bag tax that will apply nationwide, and our petition in support of this tax has become one of the top 10 most popular petitions in 2018 (at change.org). I am quite optimistic of the Ministry's willingness to push this forward.

What are some of the major barriers of change, that you have encountered?

Some interest groups are against a ban on plastic, arguing that it may cause unemployment, inflation, and is not the solution to the waste problem. They cite improvement of waste collection, recycling, and repurposing as solutions. I can completely agree that waste collection, recycling and repurposing are good ideas - but unfortunately only 9% of plastics get recycled worldwide. Surely it wouldn't hurt to ban a few single-use plastic items that wouldn't normally get recycled anyway, so that recyclers can focus on recycling the high-value plastics.

Environmental Law is a broad term that describes a network of treaties, statutes, regulations, common and customary laws addressing the effects of human activity on the natural environment. What do you think are the most valuable components of "legal enforcement" in Indonesia?

Legal enforcement is tricky. It requires that legislators do a good job of drafting a law that makes sense, it requires law enforcement officials that are equipped to recognize and act upon violations, and it requires judicial bodies that understand enough about environmental aspects and principles to judge in favor of a decision that safeguards environmental protection. These three requirements have not always worked smoothly in Indonesia, and as a result there a lot of laws that simply do not get translated into action.

How can we improve the enforcement of strong and valuable laws and how can we ensure that these enforcements stand the test of time?

As a society we can improve enforcement by helping the government monitor the implementation of laws and use all channels available to report violations. To be living in a democracy is to have the luxury of doing that, and we must take advantage of it. Laws and the enforcement of laws are not temporary - but neither are they definitely permanent. Any new government can get ushered in and decide to change old laws, for better or for worse. It is just the reality of how government works and we have to accept that and be prepared to be the checks and balance.

How do cities differ from rural areas?

It is generally harder to manage waste in cities than in rural areas. Waste management should be decentralized as much as possible, and it is easier to get village dwellers to get their tightly-knit community together, agree on a way to sort, compost, and manage waste in their own village before relegating out the residue to officials. City dwellers are more individual, rarely at home, live in densely populated areas and are so removed from the natural world that it is not surprising to find many people have no idea that food scraps can be composted.

The waste management solution to rural areas and cities should be similar (i.e. decentralized), but the approach to people needs to be different. That being said, I'd also like to acknowledge that it is even harder to manage waste in isolated rural areas, like the eastern islands, because somehow plastic packaged products find their way easily on to these islands and yet few had the foresight to figure out how to get them off the island.

In 2018 you co-authored a paper on the Indonesian Village Fund and how it could be used to more effectively help sustainable rural economic development. Has that paper been well received, and have any of its recommendations been implemented?

Yes, the paper was well received because it highlighted crucial findings on how the Village Fund has potential to be channeled towards environmental protection, but instead gets disproportionately channeled to other activities (such as infrastructure building). Recommendations have not been implemented yet (it is not easy to get from research to policy), but it triggers discussions on the huge potential for the more than 74,000 villages in Indonesia to play a bigger role in shaping the environmental sustainability of the nation.

What is the current focus of your work with the Climate Policy Initiative?

At CPI we focus on how public and private finance can be channeled more effectively to combat climate change. We work a lot on tracking where existing finance flows, whether those expenses are effective in funding activities that mitigate climate change, and coming up with new and innovative financing schemes to fund sustainable land use and renewable energy projects.

In your personal experience, are regional or national efforts more effective in tackling environmental concerns? i.e. can we rely on the state to properly implement national-level programs, or should the focus be on regional governments and local actors?

I actually believe that both the national and local governments have an equally important role to play, and it would be impossible to prioritize one over the other.

What do you want to achieve until 2025 and how can we and the general public help you achieve that?

I'd like to see a phasing out of single-use plastics nationwide, together with a decentralized waste management system at every village and kelurahan. The big picture is simple: the organic waste should be composted at the source. Plastics that have little value should stop being used and plastics that have high recyclable value should be separated, collected, and recycled through multiple and if possible infinite cycles. Every individual can help make this happen by starting with themselves by abstaining from using single-use plastics, and then start influencing friends and family, and then collectively start influencing your local officials.