This is great news. It is even the world's best news I've ever heard. Alhamdulillah (thank God)Jakarta (ANTARA) - Indonesian actress Yuki Kato welcomes Jakarta Governor Anies Baswedan's regulation number 142/2019 on banning single-use plastic bags at shopping malls, supermarkets, and traditional markets in the capital city arguing that the policy would help reduce plastic waste.
"This is great news. It is even the world's best news I've ever heard. Alhamdulillah (thank God)," Kato said in Jakarta on Tuesday commenting on the governor's endeavor to reduce the plastic waste through the regulation number 142/2019 he had just signed.
Yuki Kato who played in several movies, including the Adhe Dharmastriya-directed "Nikah Yuk" (Let's Get Married), said she fully supports the implementation of this Jakarta governor's regulation.
She said she herself has been attempting to reduce the use of single-use plastic bags in her daily activities despite the fact that sometimes, people could not get rid of plastic straws and wraps.
Apart from that, Yuki Kato, the actress who was born on April 2, 1995 from a Japanese and Indonesia couple, said she believes that consistently enforcing the ban of single-use plastic bags at modern and traditional markets around Jakarta would help change the people's habit.
The issuance of the Jakarta governor's regulation number 142/2019 has forced those managing shopping malls and traditional markets in the capital city to provide their consumers with eco-friendly bags and get rid of single-use plastic ones.
The regulation has been put into effect since Dec 31, 2019 but it is still socialized for six months before being enforced effectively in July 2020.
ANTARA noted that Jakarta discards seven thousand tons of garbage daily, with some 1,900 to 2,400 tons of it constituting plastic trash.
Due to the grave threat of these plastic bags, in July 2019, a civil society coalition of 49 environmental groups, including the Indonesian Forum for the Environment (Walhi) and Greenpeace, launched a public awareness campaign in Jakarta.
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They highlighted the menace of single-use plastic bags by showcasing a plastic monster to raise awareness among community members of the grave threat of marine debris akin to that posed by a dangerous monster.
Global environment watchdogs, such as Greenpeace, have also sent a clear message to multinational corporations in connection with the massive amounts of single use-plastic packaging they have produced.
Jen Fela's article titled, "Plastic monsters from around the world return home to Nestlé" that Greenpeace published on its website on April 24, 2019 revealed that the total amounts of plastic packaging that multinational companies annually use are huge.
Nestle, for instance, used 1.7 million tons of plastic packaging in 2018 (Fela, 2019). In terms of plastic bags, some 9.8 billion plastic bags are used in Indonesia every year, and almost 95 percent of it will end up as waste, according to the Environment and Forestry Ministry.
The total number of plastic straws used by Indonesians daily reaches some 93 million, rising from nine percent in 1995 to 16 percent in 2018, the ministry's waste management directorate has estimated.
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Translator: Yogi Rahman, Rahmad Nasution
Editor: Fardah Assegaf
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