How to Tackle Marine Plastic Pollution in the Philippines?
Plastic waste is everywhere.
Without significant change, there will be more plastic than fish in the ocean by 2050.
Basically, the equivalent of 1 truckload of waste is dumped every minute into the ocean.
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The Philippines is facing a huge plastic crisis.
80% of marine plastic waste has originated from Asia, especially from China, Indonesia and The Philippines.
To give you an idea, year’s worth of “sachet” use in the Philippines can cover entire Metro Manila one-foot deep in plastic waste. And it is about 1 million tons of plastic waste that are produced every year in Metro Manila.
Where would you put such a huge amount of plastic waste in a country where available space is already very limited?
There is an urgent need for a more efficient plastic waste management system in the Philippines, from collection to recycling.
74% of plastic leakage into the oceans comes from waste that has actually been collected! This is mainly because some private hauler companies unload their trucks into water bodies on the way to proper disposal sites in order to cut costs.
About 9% of plastic waste produced in the Philippines is recycled.
Plastic waste types that are collected and recycled are quasi exclusively PET bottles and HDPE/PP containers. Flexible plastic waste, such as LDPE packaging and sachets, has nearly no value yet and represent about 50% of the plastic waste mix.
Moreover, less than 1% of Philippines plastic waste is actually fully recycled locally. PET bottles are crushed into flakes and HDPE/PP containers are pelletized into granulates.
In both cases, a large majority of recycled PET flakes and HDPE/PP recycled granulates are exported to be transformed into new products abroad, especially in China, into textile (nylon) and tubes (HDPE).
No one wants to pay for proper plastic waste collection.
At the Plastic Flamingo, we collect and recycle plastic waste. We manage a large network of collection points in Metro Manila.
In less than a year, we already collected more than 20 tons of plastic waste from more than 50 collections points. And our collection network is booming.
We collect from schools, universities, condominiums, villages, communities, offices, stores, hotels, etc. And we can see that people in the Philippines are very eager to find a solution for their plastic waste.
But sustainable, non-polluting and ethic plastic waste collection has a cost that Local Government Units (LGUs), individuals and organizations are still reluctant to pay.
We have been collecting for free for about a year, to test the market. And we are now trying to launch paid plastic waste collection services for communities, organizations and individuals.
But it is very difficult to change mentalities. It is already quite difficult to collect for free, without paying a fee to our collections points, so to make them pay for the service will take time and will require a lot of efforts.
The cost of doing things properly is about 4 times more than the actual plastic scrap value.
Our total operation cost for collecting and segregating plastic waste is about 100 pesos (Php)/kg. More than half of it is for paying our workers at the sorting plant.
At the door of a standard plastic recycling factory in Metro Manila, plastic scrap value is on average at 25 pesos/kg, depending on the type of plastic.
In a system with several intermediaries, like junk-shops of various sizes, between the waste pickers and the recycling plants, such low cost is only reachable by exploiting people in a rather indecent way.
In our case, the difference of price is mainly explained by the quite high price of warehouse rental and logistics challenges in Metro Manila, and by fair wages paid to our employees.
Finally, cost of plastic collection and sorting can decrease with volume, thanks to scale economies. However, based on our computation, it will probably not go below than 50 pesos/kg.
May we share the bill?
Plastic recyclers, like The Plastic Flamingo, can pay part of the bill if they manage to locally produce and sell recycled plastic products with enough value to cover the whole chain. But it is a challenge they may not be able to achieve alone.
Informal sector should be part of the discussions too, to see how we could manage together a smooth transition towards a more regulated system.
FMCG companies have the great opportunity to prove that they are also part of the solution, thanks to the concept of Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR). They can already offset their plastic footprint with our plastic compensation credits.
Local public sector should agree to pay a little price for plastic waste collection services that are done properly and ethically.
As for example, we offer a plastic waste collection service for 3,000 pesos/month for a standard village community.
We believe that it is together, without judging each other, but with an honest collaboration, that we will be able to tackle marine plastic pollution!