Diet Kantong Plastik

Yesterday I traveled down to Bandung from Jakarta to meet with one of the leading NGOs dealing with waste management and recycling in Indonesia, Greeneration Indonesia.

Here, Mufti Alem, member of Greeneration Indonesia, and designer of the BaGoes bag, explained to me their tri-fold approach to improving  environmental standards, consisting of:

1) Diet Kantong Plastik or ‘Plastic Bag Diet’- as a campaign, encouraging people to change their lifestyle to one that is more environmentally sustainable.

2) BaGoes– as a product, foldable, portable, fashionable, and sustainable shopping bags, which they market and sell through a partnership with Cirle K convenience stores.

3) MasukRT– as a program, community initiated and maintained composting and recycling projects in various neighborhoods around Bandung.

The campaign is centered around getting people to go on a diet from plastic bags, consuming less of the bags that are frequently seen discarded along the streets and clogging up the rivers and streams that flow through this mountainous city.

One way they have sought to achieve this is through the design and development of portable reusable shopping bags. They have branded this product ‘BaGoes’, a play on words consisting of Bag-Goes (everywhere with you), and pronounced ‘Bagus’, a statement used in Bahasa Indonesia to proclaim that something is great. They can be folded up and closed with a zipper, making them easy to always keep on hand. They come in a variety of colors and are stamped with clever slogans or corporate sponsors, and come in sizes from small to extra large.

I have seen many takes on the re-useable shopping bag in the US, and have owned several myself, but it seemed I would never have it on hand when I found myself in the grocery store. BaGoes bags, however, fold up small enough to fit on your keychain, making them easy to carry everywhere. The small size, as pictured below, is large enough to carry “two beers and some snacks”, as Mufti put it.

The revenue generated by the sale of these bags is then used to help finance Greeneration’s public awareness campaigns, as well as their community led composting projects that they promote throughout Bandung.