Plastics Innovation Hub Indonesia

Plastic waste is an issue of concern to both Australia and Indonesia. To incite action, the Indonesian government set the ambitious target of reducing its marine plastic waste by 70% by 2025. Likewise, the Australian Government committed the ending of plastic waste as a core mission. There have been multiple initiatives to combat plastic waste, however no efforts to coordinate collaboration and combine resources to support governments achieve their targets. The Plastics Innovation Hub provides a platform for stakeholders to assemble to innovate, and in so doing prevent the duplication of efforts, and implement solutions with long-term impact aspirations.

The Hub’s blueprint is designed to scale disruptive solutions that shift the dial on plastic waste across Indonesia and Australia. The Hub plays an important role in 1) identifying and understanding the work that different stakeholders are doing across the plastics life cycle, 2) supporting new ventures and research through a series of innovation activities that increase their investment and technology readiness levels, 3) creating multidisciplinary partnerships to ensure that all solutions consider holistic approaches, and 4) is composed of a facilitation team with the purpose of providing tools and resources for solutions to succeed in their innovation journey.

Co-designing with key stakeholders, our Hub addresses key challenges and leverages opportunities. The Hub allows for many voices to be heard, enabling strategic partners to engage - such as Indonesia’s National Plastics Action Plan. With an intentionally collaborative ecosystem, partners are supported to increase their impact. Furthermore, we uniquely identified three priority areas for intervention, reframing them as challenge statements. Spanning the plastic life-cycle, these statements boost the likelihood of governments meeting their reduction goals - shifting the system towards measurable impact where both up and downstream interventions are acknowledged as pivotal to making drastic plastic waste reductions for the long term.

A unique element of the Hub’s design is our curation teams. The Strategic Curation team is the advisory body that provides the hub with possible strategic directions. Members include a cross-section of important stakeholder groups across the Indonesian plastics ecosystem. Having this body keeps the entire program on track, and enhances CSIRO’s ability to measure the success of the Hub. To enable the effective everyday running of the online space, the Hub also has a Community team. This team communicates back to the advisory board and provides guidance and support to the hub’s users. The Communications team works with the Community Manager to deploy assets and manage social media platforms. The Pathway teams hone in on the challenge statements and the design and delivery of events. Through the coming together of scientists, community members, government bodies, and business, the Hub can also turn the environmental issue of plastic waste into an economic opportunity. To support this collaboration, all materials are produced in Bahasa Indonesia and English. The Hub draws on the latest technology to deal with the plastic waste issue including the use of Artificial Intelligence to identify and trace pollution and using enzymes to degrade PET plastic and microplastics.