Plastic hot button: those pesky bags

You can't blame the anti-plastic-bag activists, those pesky grocery market bags are everywhere. Greenpeace partnered with Ecowaste Coalition and found that plastic bags accounted for 51% of the trash floating on Manila Bay. I walked over there today and sure enough there are waves of trash coming up to shore, as you can see in this picture. Celebrities got together to support the use of the local bayong or handmade reusable bag made of palm leaves. TV anchors, actors and even Ms. Earth Philippines got the news in the press (the cult of personality is very strong here in the Philippines, it's like a mini USA in more ways than one). It's funny because I watched the broadcast news of their "action" and there they were putting their vegetables in the bayong, only their vegetables are wrapped in those small transparent vegetable bags...uhm, ok.

I first became aware of this trash issue at an emergency meeting held at the Philippine Plastic Industry Association headquarters in Koloocan, an old Chinese industry neighborhood. I'm invited here by a friend of Prof Chu and suddenly find myself smack in the middle of the plastics industry, making all the contacts I could possibly need for my research. Mr. Tony Chiung is presiding and represents the recycling industry at the national level as one of the private sector members of the National Solid Waste Management Commission, created under new law RA 9003 (more about that some other time). He really did have a very good point: it's not that there should not be options. People can choose to carry their groceries home in anything they please. But why is there such a litter problem with plastic bags? For Chiung, there is simply no industry solution yet for plastic bag waste.

Efren Go takes the mike to address the audience. He runs one of the biggest MRFs in Manila. His group has five sites and they recycle 1000 tons of waste each month. He says he has the technology for recycling plastic bags, but that his problem is volume. There just isn't enough being collected. He can recycle 1 million kg of plastic bags each month and can expand operations if there's enough supply. I interview Efren during the course of this industry meeting and he tells me he will recycle ANYTHING as long as there's a market for him. I ask him about the limitations of recycling, how many times can you keep breaking down and re-using waste. He says there is no limit, you can always add a small amount of new, higher quality plastic, and just keep going with the cycle. From plastic bags, he makes pellets than are then used to make containers, tubes and rope. The problem lies in the transportation cost for plastic bags and also the amount of electricity needed to run the machines. I forgot to ask about waste water runoff, as there is also a cleaning process involved.

Mr. Co, my host, is very enthusiastic about recycling and tells me that 10 years ago nobody wanted to touch the issue, let alone take responsibility. When PET bottles were a hot topic, the industry found a way to recycle, transform, re-use. Then it was Styrofoam, and same thing happened. Now it's plastic bags. I would wager that the sachet industry is up next.

Most people use them as trash bags, as you can see here in our kitchen (I would bet those celebrities do as well, we need to do some celebrity trash investigation). I have no idea what the consequence of this is vs. using regular trash bags, also see in this picture. In speaking to Bert Guevara (see previous blog), he tells me that his barangay uses them to collect organic waste and that he has a machine that can then separate organic from plastic, and maybe re-use the plastic? The research continues.