The annual cycle of global festivities — be it Christmas and/or New Year’s Eve — oftentimes brings forth an undeniable surge of celebratory waste. What can the expat community do to shift this holiday narrative from ‘consumption’ to ‘conservation’?
For the expat community in Indonesia, holiday traditions typically offer a unique dual challenge: the desire to replicate familiar comforts while simultaneously integrating into a host nation that grapples intensely with the environmental fallout of rapid economic development. This intersection of global traditions and local ecological realities forms a critical nexus for sustainability discourse.
Indonesia, an archipelago nation boasting unparalleled biodiversity, currently faces critical pressures from consumption patterns often exacerbated by celebratory spikes. The government actively pursues a goal to reduce waste generation by 30% by 2025 and manage 70% of residual waste, as outlined in Presidential Regulation No. 97 of 2017 on the National Policy and Strategy for the Management of Household Waste (Kebijakan dan Strategi Nasional Pengelolaan Sampah Rumah Tangga dan Sampah Sejenis Sampah Rumah Tangga or Jakstranas). The festive season, characterised by a temporary but significant uptick in single-use plastics, imported packaging, and food waste, directly tests the efficacy of these policies on the ground.
Nature as a teacher
The philosophical underpinning of the Minangkabau society, particularly the concept of Alam Takambang Jadi Guru (meaning ‘the unfolding nature becomes our teacher’), offers a powerful, pre-colonial framework for sustainability that may hold profound relevance for the contemporary expat community in Indonesia.
This tenet mandates a life lived not merely adjacent to, but in active, respectful harmony with the environment. It dictates that customary laws (adat) must consistently adapt to, and draw lessons from, the enduring principles observed in nature. This ancestral wisdom inherently rejects the linear, high-throughput model of resource consumption — a model that the modern, expansive festive season often amplifies.
Traditional Minangkabau resource management, in particular, has always emphasised circularity: materials return to the earth, waste is minimal and organic, and consumption never exceeds the regenerative capacity of the ecosystem.
Although Indonesia’s commitment to robust environmental governance has been formally codified in Jakstranas, the surge in consumption during the festive season has historically created a significant friction point against achieving these national goals. The episodic consumption spikes inherent in the holidays have consistently challenged the infrastructural capacity of municipal waste management systems across major urban centres. The expat desire for traditional festive items, often imported or purchased through modern retail chains, has unfortunately exacerbated the volume of non-recyclable plastic packaging.
Perhaps the most egregious policy-practice disconnect has emerged in the area of food waste. Jakstranas implicitly demands a reduction in organic waste sent to landfills, yet festive celebrations — marked by elaborate international buffets and excessive catering — have demonstrated a worrying lack of foresight in food management. Businesses and individuals can easily implement mandatory food donation programmes for surplus edible items, but this, oftentimes, has not been prioritised in private expat events.
The Indonesian Ministry of Environment and Forestry issued Regulation No. P.75/2019, establishing the Roadmap for Waste Reduction by Producers. However, during festivals, the influx of imported seasonal goods and complex supply chains usually creates loopholes.
What can the expat community do?
The discourse surrounding expat environmental impact has historically been dominated by assessments of individual consumption habits. However, achieving Jakstranas’ targets demands a shift toward recognising the expat community as a powerful collective agency.
International residents, often affiliated with multinational corporations (MNCs) and influential chambers of commerce, actually possess unique structural advantages that can be strategically leveraged to reinforce Indonesian environmental policy. The most critical role for expat collective action lies in establishing formal policy partnerships with Indonesian local governance structures. For too long, the relationship had primarily centred on regulatory compliance rather than the co-creation of solutions. Now, expat organisations should consider actively presenting themselves as partners in implementing policy innovation.
Another suggestion to consider is how large expat organisations can jointly issue procurement tenders that mandate zero-waste packaging, local sourcing, and biodegradable materials for all festive season supplies. This unified buying power can successfully create a stable, profitable market for Indonesian small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that specialise in sustainable alternatives. Furthermore, expat-led community groups can establish a programme akin to a local “Green Certified Vendor” initiative for festive suppliers, effectively incentivising a massive transition among caterers and event organisers in directly supporting Indonesia’s green economy agenda.
Expat professionals with expertise in urban planning and environmental law can organise workshops for local government officials, sharing global best practices that have already achieved measurable success. Ultimately, a community, including an expat one, always possesses the capacity for collective agency — by moving beyond isolated individual efforts to structured, policy-aligned collective action.
The culmination of these policy alignments and collective actions rests upon a foundational ethical imperative. Residency in a host country has always carried an obligation that transcends mere obedience to local laws; it requires active stewardship of the host environment.
Indonesia, as the world’s largest archipelago, is facing a climate crisis that will disproportionately affect its communities and globally significant biodiversity. We — the natives and the expats — must forcefully reject the notion that convenience justifies ecological harm. The core ethical test for the expat community, particularly, is founded on the principle of Intergenerational Equity. One’s actions today will determine the resource availability and environmental quality that future generations will inherit. This is a chance for the expat community to demonstrate that its presence can contribute a net positive to Indonesia’s ecological resilience, shifting the narrative from consumption to conservation.
The annual festive season presents the Indonesian expat community with a clear and urgent mandate: to reconcile global celebratory traditions with the nation’s critical environmental policies. By internalising the deep-rooted wisdom of Minangkabau’s Alam Takambang Jadi Guru, as well as transforming our collective capacity into direct policy partnerships, the expat community can transform this annual challenge into a profound opportunity.
This opinion piece was written by Taufiq Ihsan, an assistant professor at the Environmental Engineering Department of Universitas Andalas, Indonesia.