Producer responsibility moves to the centre of Indonesia's plastic strategy

From voluntary pledges to a national roadmap

Indonesia's push to make manufacturers responsible for the packaging they put on the market did not begin in 2026. Its legal foundation, Minister of Environment and Forestry Regulation No. 75 of 2019 on the Roadmap for Waste Reduction by Producers, has been in force since late 2019, running on a phased timeline through 2029. What is changing now is enforcement pressure and public attention, both visible in a July 2026 industry forum in Jakarta that put the regulation's slow uptake in front of government, producers, and recyclers at the same table.

The 2019 regulation covers three priority sectors: manufacturing, spanning food and beverage, consumer goods, cosmetics, and personal care; retail, covering modern stores, shopping centres, and markets; and food and beverage services, including hotels, restaurants, cafes, and catering. Producers in these sectors are required to submit their own reduction roadmaps, covering packaging made from materials that are difficult to decompose, hard to recycle, or not reusable, and to report progress against a 30 percent cut in packaging waste generation by 2029, measured against each company's own baseline.

What the roadmap actually asks of producers

The mechanism is deliberately company-specific rather than a single national quota. Each producer covered by the regulation has to establish its own baseline packaging volume, then submit a reduction plan built around three levers: using materials that are easier to break down or recycle, increasing the share of packaging that is actually recycled, and expanding reuse. Reporting happens annually through the Ministry of Environment's dashboard, and the obligation covers not just packaging sold, but returned and expired products as well.

On paper, that is a comprehensive framework. In practice, uptake has been uneven. Industry group Systemiq's 2022 review of producer responsibility in Indonesia found that most companies still treated the roadmap as a reporting exercise rather than a design constraint, submitting plans without the operational changes needed to hit them. The compliance gap has persisted since: as of mid-2025, national compliance with EPR reporting obligations under the roadmap sat below 5 percent, according to figures cited by the Indonesia Packaging Recovery Organisation, the closest thing the country has to an industry-wide clearinghouse for this obligation.

IPRO: the first attempt at a shared compliance system

That low compliance rate is precisely the problem the Indonesia Packaging Recovery Organisation, known as IPRO, was built to solve. Established in August 2020 and launched more fully in 2023 as Indonesia's first multi-stakeholder packaging recovery organisation, IPRO started with six founding companies, among them Coca-Cola, Danone, Unilever Indonesia, Indofood, Nestle, and Tetra Pak, and has since grown to 14 member companies. Rather than each producer building its own separate collection and recycling infrastructure, IPRO pools members' obligations into a shared, professionally managed system for selective collection and material recovery, which is meant to be cheaper and more consistent than fragmented, company-by-company compliance.

The model has already attracted capital beyond IPRO's own membership fees. In 2021, Danone and Veolia opened a food-grade PET recycling facility with capacity to process 25,000 tonnes of material a year, one of the earlier concrete investments tied to producer responsibility commitments in Indonesia, and a demonstration that EPR-linked infrastructure can be built at commercial scale when a company treats the obligation as worth investing in rather than merely reporting on.

A public forum makes the case for collaboration

The current push came into sharper public view on 3 July 2026, when PT Heinz ABC Indonesia hosted a media discussion in Jakarta titled "Circular Economy in Action: Synergy of Multisectoral Partnerships in Accelerating Sustainable Waste Management," timed to World Environment Day. Mira Buanawati, General Counsel and Head of Corporate Affairs at Heinz ABC Indonesia, said the company's participation was meant to support the national EPR and circular economy agenda directly, alongside Lestri Fajrinia, the company's Head of Research and Development, who addressed how packaging choices at the design stage affect downstream recovery.

Agus Rusly, the Ministry of Environment's Director of Circular Economy and Waste Management, used the forum to frame the shift underway in policy terms.

"Indonesia continues to strengthen the transformation of waste management from a linear approach to a circular economy," Rusly said.

Reza Andreanto, IPRO's General Manager, made the case for why producers specifically bear responsibility once a product leaves the shelf.

"Packaging does not stop its journey after being consumed or used by consumers," Andreanto said, a point echoed by Andriansyah, founder of the waste management group Kita Olah Indonesia, who represented the community and informal-sector side of the discussion.

What producers should prepare

For a company covered by the 2019 roadmap, the practical questions have not changed even as the pressure to answer them has grown: what packaging is placed on the market, in what volumes, in what materials, and what actually happens to it once a consumer is done with it. Firms that already have clean answers to those questions, ideally through membership in a shared system like IPRO rather than a standalone compliance function, will find both the current roadmap and any tightened future rules cheaper to meet. Firms still relying on estimates, or treating the annual report as the entire obligation, are the ones most exposed if reporting requirements are enforced more strictly or if a mandatory funding mechanism is layered on top of the current voluntary participation model.

Sirkularium's view

Sirkularium reads EPR as fundamentally a design problem before it is a compliance one. Packaging chosen for recoverability, standardised across a company's product lines where possible, and reported on honestly turns a slow-moving legal obligation into a manageable operating programme rather than a recurring compliance scramble. The gap between the roadmap's 30 percent target and a sub-5 percent compliance rate is not evidence that the policy has failed; it is evidence that voluntary reporting alone has not been sufficient to move the sector, which is exactly the argument IPRO's growth from six to fourteen members, and the government's continued public engagement through forums like the July event, are meant to address. For government and public institutions, the near-term signal worth tracking is whether IPRO's membership and the tonnage flowing through its collection system continue to grow faster than the compliance rate the ministry reports, since that gap between voluntary industry leadership and baseline regulatory adherence is the clearest measure of how much further mandatory enforcement will need to reach.