Stop those sachets!

Stopping the production and use of plastic sachets almost all of which are unrecyclable will be a herculean task, but something that needs to be put high up on the agenda of environmental activists to prod the government, businesses, and consumers to act fast and quickly.

The sachet problem has grown to humongous proportions in the Philippines as Filipinos have taken to its use like ducks to water. More than 150 million sachets are used daily, and new estimates place these to be at 52 percent of the three millions tons of plastics produced and used yearly in the country.

Almost every consumer item that can be packaged tingi-style comes in sachets ready for daily use: shampoo and conditioners, toothpaste, coffee mixes, food and condiments, liquid laundry products, even skin care products like lotions and sunscreens.

The problem is that these pesky sachets have slipped through the wordings of numerous laws passed during the last two decades to address environmental degradation, hence the now unabated growth of products in sachet packaging by consumer companies.

Sachets, because of their handy sizes and low value, evade ending up in junk shops or recycling centers, and even incinerators. Instead, they are buried forever in landfills eluding decomposition. Worse, they end up in oceans menacing sea life and threatening ecological balance.

Grassroots initiatives

In the absence of clear and effective laws, many environmentalists have been focusing on stopping or reducing sachet use at the grassroots level through partnership with small businesses or encouraging local government initiatives to improve collection and disposal of single-use plastics.

Some movements encourage consumers to patronize stores that refill products in reusable containers, much like what was done decades ago before plastic packaging became popular. This has gained some support, but not enough to make any meaningful impact.

Local governments are once again looking at a total ban of single-plastic use, but this pretty much legally covers only plastic “sando” and the flimsy “labo” shopping bags used to wrap or carry goods bought from supermarkets, groceries, and wet markets – and even these bans rely on unrelenting vigilance by regulators.

The amount of plastic waste, meanwhile, continues to grow. Sachet use, in particular, has become so pervasive that going after the millions disposed by Filipinos daily will likely wear out the resolve of even the staunchest environmental activist.

Focus on producer responsibility

With this realization, environmentalists are shifting their sights from “downstream” to “upstream.” The call to make plastic producers and companies that use plastics for their products under an extended producer responsibility (EPR) law accountable has never been so loudly and urgently blared.

This, however, shall not be a walk in the park. Several business alliances are already bolstering their positions on the proposed single-use plastics regulation law, one that consolidated 38 existing bills, which ultimately will decide whether single-use plastics will be at best phased out or regulated.

The bill has passed the Lower House, and is due for deliberation on the Senate floor. Despite the President’s expressed wish for a total ban on single-use plastics, and which the Climate Change Commission headed by Finance Secretary Sonny Dominguez recently supported, a number of significant changes could still set back environmentalists’ calls.

The lobby on EPR does not just hope to “reasonably” calibrate how much responsibility could and should be pinned on the “upstream” sector, but even proposes to just insert revisions to the ineffective Ecological Solid Waste Management Act of 2000 which could render introduced changes pretty much inutile.

‘Greenwashing’

The biggest fear of environment activists is what it refers to as “greenwashing,” a band-aid solution espoused by industry groups and companies for “green,” but ineffective recommendations like plastic sachet trading, recovery, and recycling, even building sachet incineration plants.

As gleaned from an initiative started by Unilever in 2012, its proposed sachet recovery program encouraging customers to return used sachets by rewarding them with free sachets managed to recover a measly four to 10 million packs of the 60 billion produced.

Faced with such dismaying results, Unilever instead offered to reduce its virgin plastic production by half, increase post-consumer product collection, and roll out more reusable containers. It failed to mention any initiatives on sachet use, though.

The sachet business has grown robustly over the last decade that consumer-led companies are reluctant to look at the real damage and cost to the environment of this convenient and throwaway lifestyle. Nor are they willing to be held accountable.

More needs to be done

New studies citing the continued rising use of oil for plastics manufacture and its adverse effect on climate change, the generation of harmful emission of heavy metals, and the incursion of microplastics into the cells of plants, animals, and even humans are still generally ignored by lawmakers and environmental regulators.

Thus, a truly total ban on single-plastic use in the Philippines – and this should include sachets – would be a landmark event by international standards. Even in developed economies, government legislation dealing with sachets is virtually non-existent.

Adding straws and stirrers in the list of non-environmentally acceptable products (NEAP) by the National Solid Waste Management Commission (NSWMC) last February in time for the International Straw Free Day is outright laughable.

A few days ago, several environment groups led by Oceana served notices to sue officers of the NSWMC for failing to act on the provisions laid out by the 2000 Ecological Solid Waste Management Act. This could be a sensible act, but we all know that much more needs to be done.

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