The Alliance to End Plastic Waste (Alliance) is pleased to announce its first cooperation and investment in the Philippines with The Plastic Flamingo, a local social company. Planks of Promise is a partnership that will increase plastic garbage collection in the Metro Manila area and process the debris in a new recycling plant, turning it into “eco-planks.”

Plastic Flamingo, a social enterprise founded in the Philippines in 2019, offers a one-of-a-kind solution to the problem of plastic waste. They collaborate with investors, sponsors, and corporate partners to manage over 60+ collection stations to help collect, sort, and recycle plastic garbage, including the Learning Tree preschools, Forbes Park community, and Enderun Colleges. The Planks of Promise initiative, with the Alliance’s help, seeks to more than increase this number to 200 collecting stations by 2022.

To help people understand the value of recycling plastic waste, The Plastic Flamingo has worked with the University of the Philippines Diliman to turn it into ecological planks, which can be used to build emergency shelter kits for Filipinos displaced by natural disasters. Various non-governmental groups will then purchase the shelter kits and donate them to the most vulnerable local communities. The planks will also be sold to subsidize with the recycling facility’s operational costs.

This is the Alliance’s first initiative in the Philippines. The Alliance is an international non-profit organization with a five-year goal of investing US$1.5 billion in solutions to help reduce plastic waste in the environment. The Alliance is working on initiatives across the globe, with a particular focus on Southeast Asia’s most susceptible areas for plastic trash leakage.

The Plastic Flamingo (The Plaf), on the other hand, is a social enterprise based in the Philippines that began operations in August 2018. The Plaf aims to create scalable solutions to combat marine plastic pollution in developing nations, particularly in Asia. The Plaf collaborates with local collection networks to keep post-consumer waste out of landfills and to locate the best recycling choices for the community.

(source: theplaf.com / photo courtesy of candymag.com)