Gokongwei unit takes on plastic challenge

Gokongwei-led Universal Robina Corp. (URC) has vowed to invest in plastic recycling and collaborate with other stakeholders to tackle the plastic challenge in the Philippines, which was cited in a United Nations Environment Programme report as one of the world’s top producers of plastic wastes that pollute the ocean.

At the GRI Sustainability Summit 2018 last week, URC president and chief executive Irwin Lee said the plastic challenge was so “immense,” but noted that a shift to paper packaging was not necessarily the right solution.

For food and beverage manufacturers like URC—the company behind the snack food brand Jack n’ Jill, C2 ready-to-drink iced tea and instant coffee Great Taste—plastic offered a lot of benefits, primarily affordability, such as in using sachets for retail customers as well as better protection of food.

“Storage is better. It’s lighter. It saves carbon footprint because you’re transporting light materials,” Lee said.

The marine pollution that plastic waste causes, Lee said, was just the tip of the iceberg because if 15-20 percent of plastic waste end up in the sea, the rest goes to either the landfills or are incinerated. “That’s an even bigger issue,” he said.

But a mandated shift to paper packaging is not necessarily the solution, Lee noted.

“In manufacturing paper bags, people know that it takes two to three times more energy, takes up 17 times more water, two to three times more greenhouse gas emission and [there’s] about five times more waste generated in producing paper than plastic,” he said.

Lee said that for people who have lived overseas like himself, the right solution on the retailing side would be for consumers to bring their own reusable bags.

“In the same manner, if we translate those analogies into the manufacturing business, what are the alternatives? We don’t have all the answers, we don’t have all the solution,” he said.

But for URC, he said the first step was to declare sustainability as part of its core agenda, embark on a strategy to build a more people- and planet-friendly culture and invest in taking on the plastic challenge in collaboration with other stakeholders.

For instance, he noted that URC was using a lot of PET (polyethylene terephthalate), cited to be the most recyclable plastic. However, he said there hadn’t been any measurement of PET usage and recycling in the country to date.

URC is also a founding member of the Philippine alliance for Recycling and Materials Sustainability (PARMS), a nonstock, nonprofit industry organization established to bring together stakeholders in the recycling value chain, including manufacturers, industry groups, retail groups, waste consolidators and haulers, recyclers and nongovernment and government entities.

The objective of PARMS is to develop and implement a holistic and comprehensive program to increase resource recovery and reduce landfill dependence toward zero waste.

Lee noted that PARMS and the city government of Parañaque, for instance, was piloting a project to address the environmental challenge of plastic waste.

PARMS is building a sachet recycling plant in Parañaque as part of a movement to recover and transform waste into assets that communities can use.

Other fast-moving consumer goods companies and PARMS members Coca-Cola System, Liwayway Marketing Corp., Monde Nissin, Nestlé Philippines, Pepsi-Cola Products Philippines, Procter & Gamble Philippines and Unilever Philippines are supporting this pilot project.