1 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION I.1 Research Background As a response to the environmental concern in global issue, many countries have started to implement the green concept in their master plan by increasing the standard of environment control or even by setting a new regulation related to the environmental concern. Governments in developed countries have started to developing plans for the greening program and also spread the issue in order to gain more contributions by expanding the environmental concern to the public. As the result, the trend of public’s lifestyle has been shifted into greener lifestyle and become more concern in suppressing the amount of daily waste, especially for solid waste generation. Solid waste is considered more problematic to the environment since they cannot easily be recycled or reused. It takes a lot more of time and effort to be able to transform solid form into something useful again. But among all of the solid form of waste, plastic is the one that hold the biggest proportion in polluting the natural land in most countries (Adiwijaya, 2008; Kannan, 2009; Rusdiansyah, 2013). The European Commission has released a Green Paper in March 2013 and informed that in 2008 there is only 21.3% of plastic waste in Eropean Union successfully recycled. Meanwhile 48.7% of all plastic waste generated was sent to landfill (Howarth, 2013). Although plastic industries has produced 'green' plastics, the use of oil based petrochemicals in the manufacturing process only make them stronger and more durable. Therefore, it makes the plastics become even more difficult to degraded or recycled. In Indonesia, the condition was a bit different. Based on the survey that has been conducted before by Adiwijaya in 2008, many Indonesian still have low level of concern regarding the adverse effects of non-degradable plastic product. Thus, plastic waste proportion generated in Indonesia has increased from 30% into 38% 2 in 2008 (Adiwijaya, 2008). In order to reduce the plastic waste proportion, government established new regulation focusing on environmental concern, namely, Undang-Undang (UU) 32 year of 2009. Every industry began to take their interests in systematic approach to greening their business activity by minimizing energy consumption and wastes generation. Some investors, however, were seen those condition as a business opportunity rather than obstacles. Private plastics recycling industries are started to established in order to reduce the plastic waste proportion. As the industries are still growing, the demand of plastic waste is also increase rapidly. This opportunity can bring such advantage to reduce the plastics waste proportion in landfill. However, the uncontrolled dumping and improper waste handling in Indonesia lead to other variety of problems, including water contamination, attracting insects and rodents, and increasing flooding due to blocked drainage canals or gullies.