ISSUE

- Mothers who have a habit of using single use plastic bags
- Live in Jakarta, Indonesia.
- Age is between 27-44
- Middle to high socioeconomic status
- Particularly women with multiple children/ large families

WHAT

Consumer's using single use plastic bags

People use single use single plastic bags every day in Jakarta which leads to large amounts of waste, particularly because of its large population of 270 million people. In Indonesia alone, 3.2 million tons of plastic bags are dumped into the ocean every year and 1.3 million are single use plastic bags (Jakarta Post, 2015).

According to Baltimoresun, plastic is a by-product of oil and when oil prices are low, there is almost no market for plastic recycling, meaning it is more economical for manufacturers to buy virgin plastic than to buy recycled plastic feedstock. Outsourcing our plastic problems abroad has left us with limited local recycling options. 

This issue relates to SDG 12 “Responsible consumption and production” as this it addresses waste generation (including plastic bags), poor sustainable practices by the public and the lack of information to live a sustainable lifestyle. 
Thereby, SDG 12 states that sustainable consumption and production practices necessarily entails to respect the biophysical boundaries of the planet and to reduce current global consumption rates to fit with the biophysical capacity to produce ecosystem services and benefits (United Nation 2015).  

WHY

Why is a plastic bag a problem for us?
There are at least 3 reasons:

1. Plastic is ubiquitous
Plastic debris is found everywhere, from the Arctic to Antarctica. It clogs street drains in our cities; it litters campgrounds and national parks, and is increasing drastically in the oceans, especially Indonesia nearby oceans as the 2nd world plastic producer (CNN 2018).

2. Plastics are one of the main products of fracking

Fracking is hazardous for the planet. It pollutes water, soil, and air with toxins, it creates underground cavities that collapse into sinkholes, and it raises pressure in underground rock formations, destabilizing them and leading to earthquakes, even in places where earthquakes are uncommon. Adding insult to injury, one of the main products of fracking is  plastics. You may not know that plastics manufacturers are dangerous to the environment, to wildlife and to people in other ways too. For example, Panca Budi Group is the biggest manufacturers of single use plastic bags, and there have been a series of high-profile accidents, a major oil leak, chemical leaks in the sea, long-running controversies over chemical dumping, and the release of toxic gas that resulted in the hospitalization of workers in Indonesia (Jarkata Post 2002). This is related to SDG 13 Climate action; plastic affects the soil by slowly release toxic chemicals. They eventually break down into the soil, with the unfortunate result being that animals eat them and often choke and die.

3. Plastics kill more than just people.

The effects upon wildlife that come from eating, or becoming entangled in, plastic debris have been reported more widely and more often than ever before, leading to public outcry and protests. An estimated 270,000 tons of plastic floating through the world’s seas where it threatens 700 marine species with its presence (United Nation 2020). In Indonesia 1.2 tonne of plastic waste is dump into the ocean (Jakarta post 2017). Furthermoew, there is growing evidence that plastics play a role in rising rates of species extinctions. entangling or lodging inside the digestive tract of an unfortunate victim, like whales and other marine mammals, birds, sea turtles and fishes, is not the end of the line, because plastics do not biodegrade, nor are they digestible. Instead, large plastic pieces break into smaller fragments that are easy for even more animal species to consume. Eating plastics results in malnutrition, intestinal blockage, or slow poisoning from chemicals leached from or attached to plastics.

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Not even microscopic animals, collectively known as zooplankton, are safe from ingesting plastics (Oceandub 2014), the only difference being that they consume microscopic plastic bits. Like plastics consumption by larger animals, microplastics can result in reduced feeding, energetic deficiencies, injury, or death of zooplankton. Since zooplankton are part of the essential foundation upon which the entire marine food web rests. Thereby plastic pollution also impacts SDG 14 Life Below Water and SDG 15 Life on Land.