June 28, 2023
JAKARTA – The growing use of low-value plastics (LVPs) in Indonesia is posing a significant challenge for the recycling industry, as the material’s near-zero value makes recycling it too expensive, according to plastic recycling start-up Tridi Oasis.
“Some [plastics] are high in value, and some are low in value or even negative,” Tridi Oasis founder Dian Kurniawati told The Jakarta Post on Thursday.
Recycling the latter would thus be “more expensive than if we throw them away”, she explained.
The COVID-19 pandemic contributed to the soaring use of low-value plastics and the resulting jump in waste, especially due to a surge in online shopping and food deliveries during restricted mobility, self-isolation and lockdowns.
LVPs were developed because of their affordability and accessibility, though the environmental risks of their use have yet to be addressed.
Low-value plastics come in many forms, such as drinking straws, single-use shopping bags, condiment sachets, candy wrappers and plastic wrap or films, many of which are used in online shopping and food delivery packages.
They also include plastics that have food residues on them or mixed with other materials, which cannot be recycled.
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Melting and reprocessing these plastics into other products was possible, but the process was unlikely to generate profit, Dian said.
However, the local industry has developed at least one way to recycle low-value plastics so it is profitable: turning them into refuse-derived fuel (RDF).
RDF involves chemical recycling to decompose plastic materials using chemical reactions or high heat and turning them into materials that can then be used as an alternative to fossil fuels.
“Chemical recycling is used to break down low-value plastic waste through chemical processes,” Dian said.
She added that Tridi Oasis had launched a new initiative in collaboration with a local cement company to collect low-value plastics for transforming them into RDF.
However, she said the electricity cost from RDF was still comparatively higher than coal, the primary fossil fuel used in Indonesia to generate electricity, making its adoption to be rather limited, for now.
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Tridi Oasis was making other efforts to increase the collection rate of LVP waste, Dian said, including incentivizing waste collectors with monthly coupons for basic foodstuffs, such as sugar and cooking oil.
Despite the challenges, she said demand for waste management was still growing. The recycling industry would therefore need more entrepreneurs and businesses to cover many sectors, including collecting, sorting, recycling and public education.
Dian also encourages more people to get involved, including by creating a “stigma” around not managing their waste, as “waste is a resource for creating new products without extracting any natural resources”.
“Waste is raw material,” she underlined.