Philippine philanthropist Nanette Medved-Po says that Asia, the epicenter of the marine plastic crisis, can also be the region that leads the fight against it
Twelve years ago I set up HOPE, a non-profit to help build public school classrooms in underprivileged communities in the Philippines. We sell millions of bottles of HOPE-branded water to fund these projects. But, as sales grow, so does our concern about where all that plastic is going.
As in many emerging markets, there is little to no recycling infrastructure in the Philippines. Precious tax dollars are already stretched over many urgent, competing priorities such as education and health care, leaving little to manage a large and highly fragmented waste problem. The net result: the Philippines is listed by the Ocean Conservancy as the third-largest ocean plastic polluter in the world.
I realised that in our attempt to solve one societal problem, we were adding to another. So in 2018, I started an experiment. While we encouraged consumers to return HOPE bottles for recycling, we also tried to take responsibility for our own plastic footprint and cleaned up its equivalent from the environment. The a-ha moment came when we hit our targets within the first year: I realised that if I could do it as a small player in a low-margin business, so could larger companies.
Read more: Nanette Medved-Po on Asia’s Most Influential
There’s a lot to do in Asia
And there’s a lot to do. There is approximately nine billion tons of plastic that has been produced from 80 years’ worth of consumption that is still with us today. And even if we collectively reduce the amount of plastic produced globally by 40 per cent, the world would still add another 11 billion metric tons of plastic by 2050. WWF estimates that, if nothing is done, there will be more plastic than fish in the ocean by 2050.
Rapid urbanisation, a growing middle class and inadequate infrastructure for waste management has turned this region into the epicentre of this crisis. Half of the top 10 countries contributing to plastic leakage to rivers and seas are located in ASEAN, according to the World Bank.
That leakage is a threat to our health, food security, livelihoods and the environment. There are now microplastics in every major source of protein, including chicken, fish, beef, and even tofu. A new study published in January 2024 by the Mindanao State University-Iligan Institute of Technology found microplastics in 96 per cent of the samples of milkfish, one of the most popular species across Southeast Asia which millions rely on for food and livelihood. In another study, fully 100 per cent of human placenta samples tested contained microplastics.