Local Concerns on Plastic Bag Charge in Indonesia: Do we really care?

摘要

Indonesia is ranked second in a list of the countries which most contribute to plastic trash worldwide after China. Indonesia has restricted plastic bags in retail since March 2016, left behind by China which has already banned them since 2008. This restriction policy regulates that the retail industry charges at least $0.02 - for every single plastic bag that is used by its buyers depends on their region. This study analysed the public concerns on the implementation of a plastic bag charge policy. Public concerns on this policy were observed by analysing the largest online petition website in Indonesia. Nowadays, online petitions are the fastest media to communicate public support about some issues to the decision makers. The local concerns in each e-petition are determined by content analysis of the petition content, orientation, and its support of the environment. The local community has an enormous perspective on seeing this policy. Most of them already show this phenomenon as environmental orientation, even though there are still people who think about the economic value in the policy's trial period. There have been 5 mass petitions focused on the plastic bag charge policy. It makes up about 3.7% of the total petitions on issues of environmental health that have been posted on the e-petition website. The time that was when the petitions were issued was on the first month when the policy was executed. Not all of the petitions support the policy implementation due to the ambiguity of money transparency. Most of the petitions claimed that the regulator should increase the nominal charge. By the time the trial time of the regulations ended, the public concerns to do with this policy had decreased.