Committed to ensure no plastic waste ends up in landfills or oceans
THE Philippines is among the countries noted as having the most amount of plastic waste in their waters. According to the ADR Institute-cited Ocean Conservancy and McKinsey Report on the Ocean Conservancy (2017), the Philippines alone produces “2.7 million metric tons of plastic waste and half a million metric tons of plastic waste leakage annually.” This, even when the country has a surprisingly high collection waste. The irony is lost following another study (Jambeck, et al, 2015) which indicated the Philippines has one of the highest percentages of waste, mismanaged waste, and total mismanaged plastic waste.
Concerns have been raised even by no less than manufacturers themselves whose ultimate goal has always been to serve the public in ways most beneficial to the community. Anything that jeopardizes this goal cannot be embraced by the industry. Most concerning is that the use of plastic has been taking all the blame, yet plastic itself need not be the cause of the trouble; at the heart of the problem lies improper waste management. And a misguided clamor for ending the use of something that immensely helps the consumer can be counterproductive.
Pro-consumer
“Remember that single-use packaging is designed with the consumer in mind,” said a packaging expert who has partnered with marketing minds on strategies that work best for the marketplace. “The great thing about single-use packaging is that food spoilage and staleness becomes much less of a concern as the product is finished off in one sitting,” he added. More importantly, in a country like the Philippines, small single-use packets allow those in the lowest income bracket to buy products they would otherwise be unable to purchase in bigger containers. This is the driving force behind the ‘tingi’ economy which thrives on fast-moving goods that fly off the shelves of sari-sari stores most frequented by lower-income families.
These consumers do not plan on buying a month’s–much less a week’s–supply for anything, because they can’t. They buy things as they need them, which means daily.
The advantages of plastics over traditional materials are what has made it the material of choice over the decades. “Plastics are a vital part of the drive to lightweight products to save energy across all industry sectors. It makes sense to exploit their range of physical properties and processability, combined with lightweight capabilities, enabling many valuable products,” said Professor Phil Coates of the University of Bradford in the UK.
According to Packaging in Perspective, a paper prepared by the Packaging Advisory Council in the UK, “Plastic packaging is one of the most important contributors to protecting food from spoiling. Food waste has a significantly higher environmental impact, particularly in the form of its carbon footprint than packaging waste.” The paper further said that with plastic packaging, food can travel farther distances and stay longer on the shelves. And because the food itself requires considerably more resources invested to create, protecting it from wastage makes more environmental sense.
Global trade has dictated that special items like liquids, gels, powders, out-of-season produce, among others, are safely protected when they reach the market, thus creating a role that plastics efficiently and effectively play. Without plastics, shelves would be empty of a wide range of products that people rely on every day. Without single-use plastic including sachets, millions of Filipinos would be denied the benefits of quality products in affordable servings.
Taking action
In response to the problem of improper waste management, which leads to plastic ending up in oceans and landfills, the Philippine Alliance for Recycling and Materials Sustainability (PARMS) and its member companies have committed to build and execute a strategy to manage plastic wastes. This will help ensure that by 2030, none of the members’ plastic packaging waste will end up in nature.
Launched in January 2020, PARMS members, along with affiliates and partners, formally signed a “Zero Waste to Nature Ambisyon 2030 (ZWTN 2030)” commitment.
Years before the declaration, individual corporate members have been taking concrete action to address this problem including shifts to recyclable packaging and engaging in post-consumer waste recovery projects in partnership with local governments, NGOs, and community members. Most of the members have set targets that by 2025 or 2030, all their packaging will be recyclable, including snacks maker Mondelez Philippines.
“Plastic is a highly efficient material used in developing packaging that provides the right levels of safety, quality, product protection, and preservation while enabling us to meet our packaging elimination goals. Switching from plastic to other less efficient materials risks creating more food waste, or much more packaging material, with increased environmental and climate change impact. We want to contribute to a circular economy where packaging material is recycled or reused, while minimizing food waste and the overall environmental impact of packaging, including on climate change, ” said Crispian Lao, co-convener and founding president of PARMS.
Mondelez Philippines, maker of Filipino favorites Eden Cheese, Cheez Whiz and Toblerone, in line with the committed goal to make 100% of its packaging recycle-ready, has recently pledged that by 2025, it will reduce its global use of virgin plastic for rigid packaging by 25% or reduce virgin plastic use in overall plastic packaging by 5% in 2025. This goes hand in hand with targeting to have 5% recycled content by weight across plastic packaging globally by the same period.
“More recently, we have launched our global Sustainable Futures platform,” shares Atty. Joseph Fabul, country manager for Corporate and Government Affairs of Mondelez Philippines. “Through this we aim to incubate, finance, and build partnerships in the impact investment space through co-funded climate projects and a new social venture fund. We aim to partner with like-minded investors, increase our impact on the world and support self-sustaining projects. Locally we have started exploring this platform through our project with The Plastic Flamingo to collect and recycle 40,000 kilograms of plastic into lumber to turn into shelters.”
The PARMS ZWTN 2030 Pledge is one of the ways the Company is tracking its performance versus its commitments.
The first step towards ZWTN is building a strategy to gain a thorough understanding of the types of wastes that end up in nature, their generation quantities, as well as their plastic components and structures. PARMS has engaged a credible think tank, Business for Sustainable Development (BSD) to undertake this study.
“One of the things we have confirmed is that plastic packaging leaks to the environment due to the limited capacity of solid waste management infrastructure across the Philippines and the small size of the recycled plastic industry, or those who produce and use recycled plastic content,” explains Lao. He outlines that major ZWTN strategy is anchored on five actions:
(1) Shift to recyclable packaging and labeling where FMCG brand owners, along with plastic manufacturers and packaging converters, will re-design both rigid and flexible plastic packaging to maximize its recycling value. (2) Reduction through alternative delivery systems where brand owners will innovate to reduce their plastic packaging use by shifting to a reuse model. (3) Strengthening on-ground recovery levels of plastic waste where PARMS, in partnership with BSD and funding partners build pilot scale models for recovery and recycling of flexible packaging to serve as examples for wide-scale implementation. (4) Output-based extended producer’s responsibility (EPR) where FMCGs and other footprint owners financially support waste recovery and diversion entities and take responsibility for plastic in their operations; and (5) Driving up investment in recycling infrastructure where investors, LGUs, and local stakeholders will be brought together to plan for setting-up recycling infrastructures and establish markets for recycled products. Each company will set targets for recycled content in their packaging materials to increase demand for products of the recycling industry.
“What the roadmap shows is that we know the most common types of plastic that our PARMS members make, and more importantly, what we should do as a collective to ensure we are zero waste to nature by 2030,” ends Lao. “We now have confirmed that it is possible to live with plastic, being as it is a valuable resource and offers many protection properties that other packaging materials do not. Lastly, we have confirmed that our members, who are made up of some of the biggest names in the manufacturing industry, are ready and are in fact already taking actions to reduce their plastic waste together with governments, NGOs and the community.”
