Plastic neutrality, now.

When CEOs declared in the recent PwC MAP CEO Survey 2020 that they will retain the work from home (WFH) arrangements, and reduce their leased office spaces anywhere between 30 and 80 percent, the accidental winner is not cost efficiency (profit), or quality of life (people), but the environment (planet).

Less travel means less fuel consumption/carbon emission, less office means more paperless transactions and more trees saved. Who would have thought that working from home can boost efforts to be carbon neutral by 2030? If you don’t care to do the math, it’s about changing our behavior to reduce carbon emissions by half.

If there is, however, one non-improvement for the planet during the pandemic, it is the unabated use of this product that is a major consumer of fuel as its raw material – plastic. In fact, observably, more plastic containers are used in the pandemic because of the takeout and delivery lifestyle that substituted for dining at the venue.

The case has long been made about the environmental harm that plastic brings. Plastic  production and plastic waste in landfills emit greenhouse gases, and plastic trash in the ocean limits the oceans and its microscopic organisms’ ability to absorb carbon. So the obvious way to help the environment is to reduce plastic production from oil, and keep plastic out of landfills and definitely out of the ocean. Thus the importance of recycling plastic: into another plastic container, or to fabric (like polyester and nylon), or to furniture (like chairs and benches), or to construction materials (like bricks or asphalt mixture), or it can also be processed back into fuel.

If recycling is part of the solution, then there are a few questions: How will the plastic trash be collected? Who will recycle? And most importantly, who will pay for recycling?

Plastic recycling is not unprecedented here. Certain companies do this but only a few. There is, however, one novel organization that seeks to propel what is best practice to be ordinary practice. Its idea is for companies to be plastic neutral. Its name is Plastic Credit Exchange (PCEx), and its founder is Nanette Medved-Po. (Yes, she of the Darna fame, and she with a bright mind and a social entrepreneur’s spirit.)

The idea is to help companies that seek to adopt sustainable practices, and to become plastic neutral – that is, to help them put to recycling the same weight of plastic that their business operations consume, sell or dispose. Given that recycling and collection of materials for recycling are not part of their core competency, they would need someone to do that for them. Since they cannot run after the very plastics that they put out in circulation as part of their products, they can recycle any plastic provided it is of the same amount, weight-wise.

This is the facility that PCEx, a non-profit organization, provides. Companies purchase plastic credits from PCEx; PCEx mobilizes its network of plastic collectors and delivers compressed or balled plastic to its accredited processing plants for recycling. (Certificates issued to companies that purchase credit are audited by firms such as PwC to give these companies comfort that the weight of plastic they purchased were in fact recycled.)

We expect more companies to take interest in plastic neutrality as more foreign investors, private equity or funds nowadays consider a target investee’s sustainable practices in its valuation.

There is another component of this project that is probably a social entrepreneur’s bias – empowerment and livelihood. PCEx is building a network starting with the Aling Tindera program, which is an alternative way of collecting plastic garbage through sari-sari stores. In this waste-to-cash program, sari-sari stores collect used plastic waste. PCEx incentivizes the women owners of the stores for the plastics they collected. This network provides a workable, strategic approach to segregating waste, and efficient transportation of plastic waste to PCEx’s partner processing facilities.

Even fisherfolks who collect plastic trash in the ocean can earn from plastics they amass under the PCEx program.

I couldn’t help but imagine the potential of garbage segregation in households to capture plastic waste. Even if done only by subdivisions led by their homeowners’ associations or condominium corporations through condominium associations, it would be a nation-changing movement.

Let it start with a private sector initiative such as that of PCEx. Maybe if it gains ground, our national and local governments would also realize that they have so much power and sufficient laws in their arsenal to impose garbage segregation under pain of penalty. Government can be the major player in plastic recycling. It’s not the only thing needed to be done but it is one of the major things a government can do.

Science says we move the needle by achieving carbon neutrality to avoid irreversible negative environmental impact by 2030. Maybe it’s not to be believed. But hear this: About 70 percent of CEOs in the PwC Global Crisis survey in 2019 say that they expect a global crisis in the next five years to come from a financial meltdown or technology failure. If they were wrong on the cause of the global crisis, it’s because no one listened to the scientists that warned of a pandemic.

Will leaders opt to simply outlive their doubts of an irreversible environmental catastrophe? Or can we graduate from being supportive to actually doing something? We must cooperate, for the lives we save can very well be of those next in our succession line.

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Alexander B. Cabrera is the chairman and senior partner of Isla Lipana & Co./PwC Philippines. He is the chairman of Integrity Initiative, Inc. (II, Inc.), a non-profit organization that promotes common ethical and acceptable integrity standards. Email your comments and questions to [email protected]. This content is for general information purposes only, and should not be used as a substitute for consultation with professional advisors.