Budi Nurtama

Characteristics of Environmental Friendly Labeled Plastic Shopping Bags in Indonesia

Plastics are synthetic polymers, made from petroleum and its derivatives which are non biodegradable. Today, more people used plastic bags to support their activities ,which caused the supply of plastic shopping bags to increase in large number. Plastic bags, eventually, are usually used as garbage which would cause negative impact on the environment. Environmental friendly plastic bags are made from renewable raw materials, such as starch from cassava, corn or others. There are the ones entirely starch based such as Enviplast (biodegradable); the ones with partial mixture of starch with plastic ores such as Ecoplas (biodegradable), the ones plastic ores are formulated with additives Oxium (oxodegradble), and conventional made from plastic ores only. Distinguishing characteristics of samples plastic shopping bags which were taken from domestic and abroad supermarkets can be seen from the result of FTIR, SEM, and AAS analysis along with burial in soil. Density of domestic plastic bag (1.119 g/cm3 ) are 49.55% smaller than samples abroad 2.258 g/cm3 .This means that in the country, a space to hold trash bags in the same weight needed almost 2x larger. Another discovery are some plastic shopping bags are labeled eco-friendly ,but had conventional plastic characteristisc .