Why the Philippines generates so much plastic waste

Just five countries account for a whopping 60% of the plastic trash that ends up in the oceans. China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam (in that order) dump more plastic waste into the seas than the rest of the world combined.

Take the Philippines, a country of 105 million. According to GAIA, a global alliance of green groups, in the Southeast Asian nation alone almost 57 million shopping bags are used. And that’s not counting smaller plastic sachets known locally as “labo” bags. Of these a whopping 16.5 billion are used each year across the country.

A staggering sum, yes.

The nonprofit reached this conclusion after conducting 21 waste assessments in six cities and seven municipalities around the Philippines. It found that over half of non-recyclable plastics came from sachets, or small plastic packets that contain aluminum lining or other materials that make them non-recyclable.

“On a per capita basis, it’s about one sachet per person per day,” explains Froilan Grate, executive director of GAIA’s Asia-Pacific office. “But on a per year, per city basis, it’s quite shocking. It runs into the millions and billions depending on the place.”

Sachets are widely used in the country because they can contain small portions of products from shampoo to snacks and are thus preferred by many customers who want bargains. Almost all these sachets are then disposed of after a single use and customers often buy them in bulk. “If you go to the supermarkets, it’s rare for you to be able to buy coffee in bigger containers, it’s all in sachets,” Grate says.

Because of such wasteful consumer habits, the country generates 2.7 million tons of plastic waste annually and a fifth of all that waste ends up in the island nation’s seas. It does not help that waste collection and recycling initiatives remain sporadic and underfunded across much of the country.

Then again, the Philippines is hardly an outlier when it comes to plastic waste in the Southeast Asia region. Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand likewise produce colossal amounts of plastic waste, largely as a result of wasteful retailing practices and consumer habits. In all these countries, most vendors, convenience stores and supermarkets alike hand out several single-use plastic bags of varying sizes with each purchase. Often even fruits like apples and bananas come individually wrapped in plastic at 7-Eleven stores.

In the past, banana leaves and pieces of bamboo were routinely used as packaging in these tropical nations, but with economic development has come the scourge of plastic, which is cheap and easy to produce on a mass scale. In Thailand every single one of the country’s 70 million citizens use eight bags on average each day, which translates into nearly 200 billion bags a year.