Slide 2

Plastic waste remained a major concern of environmental problems in Indonesia. The main
problem of plastic waste is the single use of plastic products such as bottles, straws, and plastic
bags.
At least 1.3 million tons of plastic waste is produced daily where 80% of plastic waste ended up
in the ocean, generating a main threat to the marine ecosystems. For instance, this turtle face the
abnormal growth of his shell because he trapped in plastic waste which ended up in his life
environment.
Imagine that every person use 700 pieces of plastic bags each year in Indonesia. You can multiple
that with almost 300 million people in Indonesia, so how much waste you will have? It’s almost
4000 tons of waste every day! You can fill 16 Boeing 747 aircraft with that waste every day. Now,
we know that plastic waste problems in Indonesia is being worse and worse every day.
So, for now, what we have done to overcome this problem? So far we already do these things,
reduce, reuse, recycle, recovery, and lastly safe disposal to landfill which is least favored option.
But, these steps cannot be applied every day if we still use the huge number of plastic which is not
biodegradable. It will still end up with the problem of how to dispose all the waste safely.
Slide 3
Therefore, the development of biodegradable plastics based on biopolymers is urgently needed in
Indonesia to reduce the risks of the conventional plastic to the environment. In this case, bioplastics
based on biopolymers will be degraded easily with ambient condition due to its natural properties.
One of the biopolymers that widely used in bioplastics development is starch. Starch has two main
structure, amylose and amylopectin where their quantity in starch will control the properties of
starch. Later, we will discuss about this in the next section.
Slide 4
The source of starch that we’ve already known are potato, corn, rice, cassava, etc. Among all of
these starch sources, production of cassava in Indonesia is the highest. In 2015, 22,900 tons of
cassava was produced in Indonesia which valued more than 22.9 trillion rupiah or 1.6 billion USD.
Unfortunately, over 50% of it only used as raw food without further processing, despite the fact
that cassava contains large content of starch. For this reason, many Indonesian researchers have
immense interest to develop bioplastics based on cassava starch, besides the noteworthy
advantages of starch, such as low cost, abundant, edible and biodegradable.
Slide 5
However, the development of bioplastics in Indonesia has to face several challenges including the
drawbacks of cassava starch bioplastics itself which need to be improved. In the other hand, the
process to obtain cassava starch from raw cassava also being a challenge due to the long process
of it. Moreover, Indonesia has the number of cassava varieties that challenges the researchers to
get the best varieties that can be used as raw materials for making bioplastics with excellent
properties.
Slide 6

In addition, the different content of amylose and amylopectin in starch as I mentioned earlier also
needs to be considered. Because different content of amylose and amylopectin would lead to
different properties of cassava starch bioplastics.
Lastly, the starch modification such as physical and chemical treatment would be a challenge to
be faced to get the best properties of starch that can be used as bioplastics raw material with good
properties.
Slide 7 & 8
Currently, we do our research with cassava starch to determine the mechanical and thermal
properties of different starch and glycerol concentration ratio.
Slide 9
Conclusions.