Armed with gloves, rubber boots and a rake, “Mangrove Warrior” Willer Gualva, 68, comes to Freedom Island in the Philippines almost every day to stop it being engulfed by trash.
No one lives on the island, yet each morning its shores are covered in garbage, much of it single-use sachets of shampoo, toothpaste, detergent and coffee that are carried out to sea by the rivers of overcrowded Manila.
“We collect mostly plastics here and the number one type are sachets,” said Gualva, one of 17 people employed by the Philippine Department of Environment and Natural Resources to help preserve the island and its forest.
Photo: Reuters
The department calls them “Mangrove Warriors” and pays them slightly above US$8 per day.
Five days of coastal cleanup on the Manila Bay island last month yielded a total of 16,000kg of trash, department data showed, the bulk of it plastics, including the sachets made of aluminum and blends of plastics.
These packets give some of the poorest people in Asia access to everyday household essentials. For the multinationals that manufacture them, it is a way to increase sales by targeting customers who cannot afford bigger quantities.
Photo: Reuters
Such sachets are sold in most developing countries, but the number consumed in the Philippines is staggering — 163 million pieces a day, according to a recent study by environmental group The Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA).
That is almost 60 billion sachets a year, or enough to cover 130,000 soccer fields.
In Manila’s slum areas, which are inaccessible to garbage trucks, sachets and other waste are thrown in estuaries or dumped on the street, and end up clogging drains and waterways.
“Money is hard to come by, so I only buy sachets,” said Lisa Jorillo, 42, a mother of four who lives in a slum in Manila’s Tondo area, behind a beach blanketed by trash.
“It’s likely the garbage will still be there when my son grows up,” Jorillo said, referring to her four-year-old.
The Philippines’ law on solid waste is poorly enforced and the country does not regulate packaging manufacturing.
The country is ranked third in the world for failing to deal with its plastics, according to a 2015 study by the University of Georgia, which said 81 percent of plastics waste in the nation was mismanaged.
About 14 million people live in Metro Manila, one of Asia’s teeming mega-cities. Overall, the Philippines has a population of 107 million people, and one-fifth of them live below the national poverty line, described by the statistics agency as monthly consumption of less than US$241 per person.
Jorillo’s family earns about 2,500 pesos (US$48) a week from the construction work that her husband does, and she and her family buy about 80 sachets of coffee, toothpaste and shampoo each month.
In sea-facing Manila, much of the trash ends up in the sea.
The Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and China account for 60 percent of the world’s marine plastic, or 8 million tonnes annually, the nonprofit Ocean Conservancy said.
Environmentalists say the main culprits are not governments or consumers, but the multinationals that churn out plastic packaging.
“They have money to do research that will remove the problematic packaging,” said Sonia Mendoza, head of the Mother Earth Foundation, which promotes waste reduction.
She said refilling stations could be one way to reduce the use of single-use sachets.
GAIA studied non-recyclable waste collected in Philippine cleanups and found that 60 percent of it came from just 10 companies, led by Nestle, Unilever and Procter & Gamble.
Nestle declined to disclose the volume of sachets it produced or sold in the Philippines.
Nestle said it was committed to finding ways to keep plastics out of oceans through plastic collection and recycling programs, but added that sachets prevented leakage of micro-nutrients essential to addressing malnutrition, especially among children.
Unilever did not say how many sachets it produces in the Philippines, but said its global plastic packaging production is 610,000 tonnes annually.
The figure includes “flexible packaging formats” used by 1 million micro-businesses in the Philippines, it said.
Nestle and Unilever’s target is for 100 percent of their packaging to be recyclable or reusable by 2025 worldwide.
Unilever said it has a community-based sachet recovery program in the Philippines where collected sachets are converted to school chairs and cement pavers.
It also pilot ran shampoo and conditioner refilling stations this year, which it plans to scale up.
P&G referred questions to the industry group Philippine Alliance for Recycling and Materials Sustainability (PARMS) or the government’s National Solid Waste Management Commission.
The Philippine government does not have a clear strategy to tackle its plastics crisis.
In an e-mailed response to Reuters, the department said it was in discussions with all manufacturers to identify ways to manage waste. It provided no details.
Elsewhere in the region, Indonesia has a law requiring producers to manage non-biodegradable packaging and the tourist island of Bali bans single-use plastics.
Thailand is between now and 2025 introducing bans on seven types of plastics most commonly found in the ocean, like bottle cap seals, disposable bags, cups and straws.
Vietnam hopes to raise taxes on plastic bags and its prime minister has urged shops to stop using non-recyclable plastics in cities by 2021, and nationwide by 2025.
The Philippines industry group PARMS, which includes Unilever, P&G and Nestle among its members, is building a 25 million pesos facility that aims to turn sachets into plastic blocks and eco-bricks.
However, Von Hernandez, global coordinator for the Break Free From Plastic movement, calls that “greenwashing” — or only trying to appear more environmentally friendly.
“They are not really changing the true nature of their business,” Hernandez said of the multinationals. “The plastics industry is slated to grow exponentially, especially by 2030. The bulk of that is going to packaging and you can bet this is going to end up in sachets.”
PARMS president Crispian Lao said that every effort, even those which “may be perceived as small and insignificant,” helps address the problem.
Lao said sachets were a necessity for lower-income groups, but added the industry is exploring other delivery formats and packaging alternatives.
Philippine Senator Cynthia Villar said she is pushing for a radical rewrite of an existing waste law to force firms to collect, recycle and dispose of all single-use plastics they produce.
“They always say they’re willing to do it, but it’s a different story altogether whether they’ll do it, so we have to embody it in a law so they’ll all follow,” Villar said.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
CONFIDENT ON DEAL: ‘Ukraine wants a seat at the table, but wouldn’t the people of Ukraine have a say? It’s been a long time since an election, the US president said US President Donald Trump on Tuesday criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and added that he was more confident of a deal to end the war after US-Russia talks. Trump increased pressure on Zelenskiy to hold elections and chided him for complaining about being frozen out of talks in Saudi Arabia. The US president also suggested that he could meet Russian President Vladimir Putin before the end of the month as Washington overhauls its stance toward Russia. “I’m very disappointed, I hear that they’re upset about not having a seat,” Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida when asked about the Ukrainian
RSS