SM Cares’ Plastic Waste Collection Program is a program in partnership with Plastic Credit Exchange and social enterprise HOPE.
It aims to promote eco-stewardship among SM mall-goers by providing them with an avenue where they can dispose of their plastic waste responsibly.
The newly designated Plastic Waste Collection booths in SM Dasmarinas and SM Rosario makes them 13th and 14th malls, respectively, to be used as sites for the program to date.
Instead of ending up in landfills or bodies of water, the materials collected through the initiative are processed into various resources: as components for cement, paver blocks or planks, and soon, recycled PET bottles, among others. HOPE handles the weighing and hauling of the plastics and brings them to valorizing affiliates for processing.
Through a multi-stakeholder approach and the support of the communities in its existing sites, the program so far has successfully diverted 27,287.15 kgs of plastic since its launch, which is equivalent to 35,193.128 kgs of CO2, and 45,569.5405 kgs of CO2 reduced by coal replacement.
This amount is equivalent to 140,587.46 km driven by an average passenger vehicle; 4,280,985 mobile phones charged; 11,067.65 kgs of waste recycled instead of landfilled; 1.1 garbage truck worth of waste recycled; 1,523 trash bags recycled; 1,334 incandescent lights switched to LEDs; or 582 seedlings grown for 10 years.
“With this program, part of our goal is to create a circular economy for plastics in the country that our mall-goers can contribute to simply by visiting our malls, reducing the barriers to participation for them,” said program director for SM Environment and Sustainability Liza Silerio. “It’s just one of our ways of being a responsible partner towards building sustainable communities.”
