The Philippines, long one of the biggest producers of ocean plastic pollution, is now moving quickly and boldly to tackle this crisis. Over the last two years, the Philippines has rolled out one of the world’s most ambitious laws on Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR).
EPR rules, which hold manufacturers accountable for waste resulting from their products and packaging to enable a circular economy, are a key topic in the negotiations of the UN Global Treaty on Plastic Pollution.
There are already well-established EPR regimes in a number of developed markets, including Europe, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, which typically involve government-funded collection, sorting and processing of plastic waste.
The Philippine Extended Producer Responsibility Act requires companies with at least one hundred million pesos (P100,000,000, or US$1.7M) in assets to take responsibility for an increasing percentage of their plastic footprint - measured in weight - from 20 per cent in 2023 to 80 per cent in 2028 and onwards.
The Philippines has taken a pragmatic approach and crafted an accessible law that makes these goals achievable. There are six upstream measures that can reduce their footprint, such as the use of recycled content, reusable packaging or refilling, and six downstream measures to recover their footprint, and plastic crediting is one of them.
The Philippines’ approach shows that a market-based mechanism like credits, which facilitates the cleanup of plastic waste and encourages the private sector to invest in waste infrastructure, can play a pivotal role in supporting EPR laws - particularly in emerging markets that lack collection and recycling systems.
It’s still early days, yet the country’s approach to EPR is showing promising results - it has already published its Implementing Rules and Regulations (IRR), completed the first compliance year (2023), registered 947 businesses under the EPR scheme, and enabled the recovery and diversion of 163,000 MT of post-consumer plastic packaging waste.
While not all obliged enterprises complied in the first year, continued education efforts aimed at raising awareness and compliance levels are ongoing. The majority of the largest plastic packaging producers have complied, and many went beyond the minimum 20 per cent recovery target for 2023, indicating strong support among the country’s largest obliged enterprises.
There are still significant milestones to unlock, like dealing with decades of legacy plastic pollution; enabling policies to create the supply and demand for recycled materials and to reduce and eliminate unnecessary plastic packaging; further mechanisms and guidance to achieve social inclusion and just transition; and national standards to establish transparency, credibility and accountability.
But the path is clear. Enacting and implementing EPR has allowed the country to see immediate results, start constructive discussions, realise and understand the gaps, and gather support from stakeholders through an inclusive and systematic approach. Plastic pollution has heavily hit the Filipino people, who could not afford to wait for the perfect solution. So the country has opted to act now and improve along the way.
This case study offers insights and analysis for other developing countries in a similar situation to boldly and urgently address the problem, and for negotiators of the UN plastics treaty to consider innovative approaches and voices from the Global South.
Read the full case study here. For questions about EPR and plastic credits, please contact us at info@pcxsolutions.org.
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