Filipino consumers use enough sachets each year to bury the entirety of Metropolitan Manila under a foot of plastic.
These sachets – made of single-use plastic – are widely used to sell small quantities of consumer products like shampoo, toothpaste, detergent, food, and powdered drinks, offering affordability and convenience to consumers, especially those with limited income.
Without an adequate circular economy value chain for flexibles, the roughly 60 billion sachets used annually – which also make up nearly 80 per cent of the nation’s plastic waste – are already choking the country’s waterways, polluting its oceans, and crowding landfills.
A year has passed since the implementation of the Philippines’ Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) Act, a law that lapsed in July 2022 requiring producers to adopt and implement policies for the proper management of plastic packaging waste. More obliged enterprises are complying with the law but not without challenges.
These difficulties are exacerbated by the challenges in collecting and segregating waste, a dearth of functional recycling facilities, inadequate consumer behaviour, and limited waste management companies that cannot cope with the requirements and volume of plastic waste.
The Philippines lacks the adequate infrastructure to collect, segregate, and process flexible plastic waste into food-grade recycled material – only 9 per cent of the archipelago’s annual plastic footprint is being recycled, with the majority of it being rigid plastics.
Rising inflation rates are also pushing more Filipino families to reduce household spending, further increasing the nation’s reliance on sachets, which are viewed as both affordable and convenient. Already, some 164 million pieces of flexible packaging are used in the country daily, cites a United Nations Environment Programme report, with demand predicted to rise by 5.8 per cent by 2031.
This means that an estimated 33 per cent of plastic heads straight to sanitary landfills and a further 35 per cent leaks into the open environment, highlights a report by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) Philippines.
It is these striking deficiencies that warrant a rethink and advancement of the Philippines’ recycling infrastructure in the hopes of closing the country’s staggering 85 per cent recycling capacity gap.
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