MANILA – Companies big or small can do their share in saving the environment by going “plastic neutral,” leaders of an international advocacy group and a local company that has tried this method said Friday.
Consumers have been driven by convenience and the economy in choosing single-use plastics without realizing that the impact of this practice to the environment would be difficult to reverse, said World Wildlife Fund for Nature-Philippines president and CEO Joel Palma.
“Plastic is a magic invention, it’s so pliable, you have 1001 ways of using it…but the problem is how we dispose of that. What we’re trying to do right now is try to recover as much because 91 percent of the plastic produced is not recycled,” he told ANC’s “Headstart.”
Recently, Filipino company HOPE, a social enterprise that sells bottled water to build classrooms around the country, calculated how much plastic it manufactures and try to recover and upcycle the same amount.
Nanette Medved-Po, its chair and president, said the company has set aside a “recovery fund” that would allow it to collect through its retail partners tons of plastic waste and then tap an outsourced entity that could turn these into ecobricks or energy.
“As stewards of the country, businesses need to think about the bottomline outside of profitability. They need to think about their impact on the environment,” she said in the same interview.
“I’m small and I can do it. Certainly others can do some iteration of what I’ve done to do it as well,” she added. (ABS-CBN News)
