Acquire the Impact of Agricultural Plastic Waste through Validation Workshop with RDI and iDE Cambodia
The issue of the use of plastic in agriculture is now becoming an urgent matter. Farmers still struggling to find a better alternative for handling plastic waste other than burning it and burying it. This awareness encourages the importance of alternatives to reduce plastic agriculture such as increasing the durability and recycling of agricultural plastic products, developing better waste management services, encouraging the function of the plastic recycling and recycling industry, and terrestrial ecosystem services. In addition, there is a need to take a nature-based approach to reduce plastic use and redesign conventional plastics into bioplastics.
Overseeing this fact, RDI and iDE Cambodia have collaborated to conduct research to investigate the impacts of using agricultural plastics and actions that can be taken. To validate the study findings, there was a validation workshop which was organized by RDI and iDE Cambodia on Thursday, 16 February 2023 at Sokhalay Angkor Hotel & Spa, Siem Reap Province, Cambodia. This workshop was also inviting several relevant stakeholders, ranging from farmers to government representatives, and others.
One of the workshop activities is a field visit for agricultural trials. The workshop participants were shown how the effect of mulching on sweet melon production experiments, as well as introducing peat cocoa land and organic farming. The follow-up activity was the presentation of the results of research on agri-cultural plastics by the Director of RDI, Dr. Elisabeth Rianawati regarding the potential for plastic waste generation from the agricultural sector, and the results of the Environmental Impact Analysis (AMDAL) soil sampling. The discussion was continued by Mr. Yoshua Bonar, RDI Research Fellow who discussed the Market for Biodegradable Plastics, which included market estimates, as well as challenges and potentials.
After this presentation, there was a division of discussion according to the actors, namely 1) plastic users (farmers, collectors); 2) plastic manufacturers + distributors; 3) public sector; 4) NGOs; and 5) online participants. The existence of interactive discussion sessions and questions and answers with participants made this workshop feel like a collaboration between parties to provide concrete solutions to the problems found.
To close such interactive schedules, a closing remark was presented by Kevin Robbins, Country Director of iDE Cambodia. One important note he mentioned about the workshop was how interesting it was to learn the findings from RDI research so that all the participants that were present understood the challenges better and could discuss concrete solutions for the problems found in the research. The journey to solve the problem would be long but he is optimistic for the future if all of the participants will work on it.
