PHILIPPINES: Reducing Plastic Waste Isn’t in the Bag — Yet

At a popular supermarket chain in Pasig City, located in the Philippines’ capital region, customers who filled their carts with wine, cheese, pasta, fruits and goods for the yearend holidays also had to consider how they were going to bring those goodies home. Do they bring their own reusable bags, use the supermarket’s paper bags or fork out a little extra to get a reusable tote?

A small reusable tote costs 10 Philippine pesos (about 17 US cents) and a bigger one, 40 pesos (69 cents). “We don’t offer plastic bags as an option,” said Beth (not her real name), a sales supervisor. “Those have been banned [in this city] for more than a decade now.”

But just a six-kilometre drive away in Taguig City, things are different. There, a supermarket chain provides customers with free plastic bags, emblazoned with its logo. A sales representative explained that shoppers “have the option to purchase a reusable tote bag if they want to, but [the cashiers] have never had to stop using plastic bags here.” 

In other words, where a consumer lives or goes to do shopping determines access to single-use plastics in commercial settings and shapes that person’s plastic habits.

The Pasig city council’s ban on the use of plastic bags (and styrofoam) for dry goods and regulating their use for wet goods goes back to 2010.  Its passage was a response to the destruction and floods, worsened by poor drainage due to plastic and other waste, caused by typhoon Ketsana (local name Ondoy) the year before.

Taguig launched its zero-waste plan in 2020, a month before the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns began. The plan included the phasing out of single-use plastics within the next three years. But four years later, a Taguig-wide ban is nowhere in sight.

There is no national ban or regulation on specific plastic products in the Philippines, a country of 14.4 million that is a major contributor to the mismanaged plastic waste that pollutes the world’s oceans. 

However, there is an initiative to put in place a unified ban on the use of single-use plastics across the 17 cities (including Pasig and Taguig) and one municipality that comprise Metro Manila, the capital region that is home to more than 13 million people.

In November, the head of the agency that looks after the regional governance of Metro Manila raised the possibility of passing an ordinance that would apply to the entire capital, in the same way it enforces common traffic rules across the metropolis. “In Metro Manila, there is no single policy yet but there are cities such as Marikina and Quezon City that already have ordinances banning single-use plastic,” said Romando Artes, chairman of the Metro Manila Development Authority.

In the Philippines, it is cities and local governments – not the national government – that have the main responsibility for local-level waste collection. They can pass ordinances that ban and restrict the use of single-use plastics and many more have done so over the last decade, although their capacity and resources to handle solid waste are often a challenge.

But bans on plastics, including other waste management tools are inconsistent. As in Taguig’s case, “it depends on the LGU [local government units] if they’re really strict about how it’s implemented,” said sustainability consultant Macy Añonuevo, whose work includes helping companies and industrial organisations comply with waste management regulations and measure their plastic footprint.

Still, there is much more awareness today about the country’s plastic crisis.

“The vendors love me because they’re able to cut their expenses, since they no longer have to provide plastic bags for me,” said Deng, a Pasig resident who brings her own shopping bags and containers for meat, fish and other items.

“I have made it a point to be more conscious of my plastic waste for a while now,” shared Beyremiah (not his real name), who lives in Las Piñas city, also in Metro Manila. Members of his household segregate trash and reuse or repurpose plastic containers.

But consumers, including those who are mindful of their use of single-use plastics, also find it hard to imagine a nationwide ban on them. 

Even if a total ban on single-use plastics comes with good intentions, “I feel it would be hard for them to have the general public implement this,” said Beyremiah, 38. Single-use plastic trash are still seen in cities that banned or regulated such plastic more than a decade ago, he points out. “Cities need to offer an easy to adapt alternative instead of merely banning something people have been so reliant on their whole lives.”

“What do we replace plastic with? What do we do to Filipinos whose livelihoods depend on this industry? Can the alternative match the qualities of what it replaces?” asked Ivan, a resident of Parañaque in Metro Manila. “Not only is it a burden to be borne by consumers but [by] big corporations who have the money and machinery to push this to the market.”

In January – zero-waste month in the country – three of the nine steps that the government’s Environment Management Bureau promotes are around plastic use, including eliminating the use of plastic water bottles and buying fruits and vegetables that are not in “plastic packaging that is harmful to the environment”.

Some public markets have stopped using single-use plastic on their own. A ban on single-use plastics in government offices was announced in 2020. Proposed national laws around plastics use are pending.

All these are a far cry from 2008, when Los Baños town in Laguna province became the first municipality in the country to impose a ban on plastic bags. 

“There was a news article in the local paper about consumers cursing at the local government, because even wet market vendors put fish in paper bags,” recalled sustainability consultant Jonas Dumdum, who was a university student at the time. “The bags got so wet that they’d rip easily. So, [the people] were reported in the article as saying, ‘That **** mayor, why is there a policy like this?’ ”

Crises of Environment, Planet And Health

It is well known that the widespread use of plastic in everyday products and across many industries ­– which has soared globally since the 50s – harms the natural environment and the planet. It takes hundreds of years for many types of plastic to degrade, if they do break down. Plastic bags are expected to last for at least two decades and plastic straws, the poster children of plastic waste, two centuries. 

The plastic problem contributes to the warming of the climate, because plastic is made from fossil hydrocarbonsthrough a process that uses carbon-containing raw materials, mainly natural gas and crude oil. 

The plastic crisis is also “a critical human health crisis”. Its negative impacts comes through microplastics (plastic particles smaller than 5 mm) and from toxic pollutants that people breathe in from the open burning of plastic waste, as a just-published study in the British Medical Journal says. Everyone ingests, inhales and absorbs microplastics, which are now everywhere on the planet and inside human tissues, detected too in breast milk.

It is a global problem, which is why there are negotiations for a global plastics treaty, although these have missed a 2024 completion target. Because its member countries are major sources of marine plastic pollution, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations has a regional plan to address it.

Top Emitter of Plastic Waste to the Ocean

But there a particular urgency to drastically addressing plastic use, production, management and waste in the Philippines, where plastic waste is all too visible in Metro Manila’s roads and communities, and clogs creeks and waterways. 

A country of more than 7,600 islands and many communities living by coasts and waterways, the Philippines generates some 2.7 million tonnes of plastic waste annually and 20% of that goes to the ocean, according to the World Bank. The estimates from the World Wildlife Fund for Nature are higher, at 35% (760,000 tonnes) leaking to the ocean as of 2019. 

Data used by Our World in Data estimated the annual amount of plastic waste emitted to the ocean from the Philippines at 356,371 tonnes in 2019. But that already accounted for more than a third (36.38%) of the plastic waste in the world’s oceans.

The Philippines is home to seven of the top 10 rivers that contribute the most to ocean plastic, due to factors that include settlements’ proximity to rivers, coasts and poor waste management. The Pasig River, which runs through the capital, accounts for 6.43% of global ocean plastic pollution, according to Our World in Data.

What is this plastic waste? Polystyrene pieces, a durable plastic often used in foodservice packaging, leads the list of 10 top littered plastic items and makes up 21.21% of the total, according to a 2023 report by the World Bank called ‘Combating the Plastic Waste Crisis in the Philippines’. Single-use carrier bags account for 14.81% and thin plastic bags without handles 14.75% – so these two plastic bags make up nearly a third of plastic waste. 

Clearly, addressing the reliance on plastics involves fixing the mismanagement of plastic waste. 

“Rich countries produce much more plastic waste per person than poorer countries”, One World in Data’s brief on plastic pollution explains, but they have better waste management systems. So while some developed countries have two or three times more plastic waste generated per person, the Philippines has a much higher per-capita figure of such waste emitted to the ocean. 

“The current waste management system in the Philippines is, overall, insufficient to adequately manage” all this plastic waste, the same World Bank report said. The “weak” implementation and enforcement of waste management policy has led to “large amounts of plastic waste not being collected and fed into the recycling path, and, instead, leaking into the environment,” it added.

The Philippines’ being a “sachet economy” – it has a “high dependence” on single-use plastics like sachets and pouches for shampoos to food sauces ­– “continues to worsen the alarming levels of marine plastic pollution”, the World’s Bank 2021 market study on circularity said. Filipinos are said to consume 163 million pieces of sachets daily, as these are used for low-cost retail items affordable to lower-income households.

What Waste Segregation? 

Two major national laws address the plastic waste crisis. One is a solid waste management law to be implemented mainly by local governments. The other law requires large companies to be responsible for reducing and recovering plastic packaging waste across their products’ life cycles.

Marking its 25th year in 2025, the Ecological Solid Waste Management Act requires local governments to implement a 10-year solid waste management that covers the use and recycling of solid waste, including plastic waste, and composting, as well the use of waste landfills.

Reporting “substantial progress” with this law, the Environmental Management Bureau of the Philippines’ environment department said that as of December 2023, 85% (1,355 of the country’s 1,592 cities, municipalities, and provinces) have such plans in place.

But implementation has been described as insufficient, or hard to track.

Under this law that the World Bank calls “barely enforced”, it said that “producers lack incentives to improve the design of their products for better waste management, and consumers are unwilling, and lack the option to separately dispose of their plastic waste.”

More than two decades after it was enacted, the most basic element of the country’s law managing solid waste – waste segregation – is far from a habit or social norm. 

“Although households and other waste generators in the Philippines are legally required to separate their waste so that plastic packaging can be collected, separately, in reality, this rarely occurs,” said the World Bank report on the plastic waste crisis. “This has been identified as an overarching problem that impacts waste management in the Philippines.”

After loading waste bags into a garbage truck, garbage collectors open them to search for recyclables such as polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles or aluminium cans that they can sell, Añonuevo says. “Personally, I help by separating the recyclables at home and handing them over to the collectors separately, so that they won’t need to open the bags to get them.”

Implemented since 2023, the Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) Act makes large companies share the responsibility for reducing plastic packaging waste with consumers and local governments. It requires them to have waste reduction and recovery plans for the plastic packing waste in their products.

Based on the ‘polluters pay principle’, it obliges enterprises to achieve targets for the recovery of their plastic product footprint, starting from a 20% rate by 2023, 40% by 2024 and reaching 80% by 2028. 

As of May 2024, there has been a 37% increase in the number of companies (compared to 617 for 2023) registered under the EPR programme, the environment department reported.

But this is far from the whole picture, as companies often face limited options due to the cost of running plastic waste recovery programmes and limited recycling infrastructure.

The country recycles only 28 percent of its key plastic resins. This means that “78% of the material value of plastics is lost to the Philippine economy each year” since recyclable plastic products are discarded, the World Bank explains.

A lot of flammable municipal waste, such as plastic and paper, is being ‘disposed of’ by their use – and burning – as refuse-derived fuel (RDF) by cement factories that usually use coal, a fossil fuel. 

For the Philippine government, this is a more sustainable alternative to throwing trash into landfills and provides an alternative fuel to reduce the cement industry’s reliance on coal. But there are concerns about the harmful impacts on air quality and human health from this co-processing of RDF in cement plants.

Not all plastics can be recycled, and recycling also depends on the composition, including number of layers, of plastics used, for instance, in the packaging of product sachets.

“If you buy a pack of noodles, the packaging is usually just a single layer of plastic, and that’s one kind of plastic packaging. But if you get a sachet of 3-in-1 coffee, the packaging is multi-layered. There’s plastic on the outside, but the inside is lined with aluminium. Same as with milk products or baby formula,” Añonuevo said, adding that the aluminium layer is needed for its barrier properties.

“The number one thing that I’ve learned so far [from working with companies on sustainability] is that [if you] give them an alternative to plastics, they’ll consider it,” said Dumdum, who works on environmental sustainability with companies, their employees and other groups. “But it has to be in line with their environmental targets or objectives, and it has to be cheap. Or if it will cost more, at least prove to them that it’s worth it.”

The Feel-good Approach Isn’t Enough

Appealing to virtue alone does not work that well in eliciting support for more sustainable solutions, Añonuevo and Dumdum agree.

For companies, the most effective lever tends to be ease of compliance, alongside punishments like fines for non-compliance. “‘Feel-good’ does not work on a larger scale,” said Añonuevo. “Regulations must be implemented with actual consequences.”

More Filipinos now carry water tumblers and get free drinking water from establishments and offices, instead of buying bottled water, Dumdum says. “I think that’s the number one thing that we need to address in order for us to remove the problem that is plastic waste,” he said. “Provide them with something that can be good for them, that has value for them.”

“If you’re going to really get [stakeholders] to think about single-use plastic, you don’t simply tell them, ‘It’s the law’,” said Dumdum. You really have to show them what’s in the law, or plastic waste at least, what’s the background, and why we need to do it.” 

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Mikael Angelo S Francisco is editor-in-chief of FlipScience.