A couple running a junk shop in Valenzuela City is saving retirement money by accumulating incentives from collecting plastic waste for recycling. The fund is stored as digital money in their PlasticBank app account. 

The app was developed, by Plastic Bank, a social fintech company founded by Canadian social entrepreneur David Katz in May 2013 to solve poverty and plastic pollution while growing a business all at the same time. It functions as a record of plastic waste collected by its users and sold to Plastic Bank branches (junk shops) located in their community. 

It also converts the sale into e-money which is deposited to a GCash account of local collectors and junk shops. A kilo of discarded plastic or PET bottles sells for P10.

During a presentation of the Plastic Bank at the Seda Hotel in Bonifacio Global City on 22 May, Katz said that some 22,000 individual plastic waste collectors are now using the PlasticBank to earn income. Worldwide, nearly 60,000 people use the app in five countries where Plastic Bank operates. 

And through Plastic Bank and the app, more than 8 billion discarded plastic bottle have been diverted from landfills and potentially the oceans since 2013. The company started commercial operation in the country when it got its Securities and Exchange Commission registration in 2020.

Aside from cash incentives, PlasticBank app users can earn rewards, discount vouchers and prizes for collecting and trading plastic waste.

Rene Guarin, Plastic Bank country manager and vice president for Asia and Pacific, said that with e-vouchers, collectors “can go to the supermarkets, exchange this for food, for medicine, for school supplies.”

Katz revealed that he is also planning to offer app users interest-free loans. “It’s really more of an (cash) advance. Because we know how much you collect and how frequently, I can give you maybe a year’s worth of collection now,” he said, adding that such money can cover expenses for family life events such as a death, a wedding, etc.
“You can get the money now and we just pay you less until you pay back the loan,” Katz said.

Business as usual

“There’s the whole business side to everything we’re doing, but I’m really trying to create a movement for humanity and create something where the whole world comes together to make a change,” Katz said.

As a business, Plastic Bank itself needs to earn to be able to pay plastic waste collectors. Katz said that aside from the collector community, families, schools and junk shops, Plastic Bank’s partners include the aggregators, where all the collected plastic waste are consolidated, and the processors, where all of it end up and recycled or upcycled into different useful products.
“The material we collect, we do sell it to large brands in the world,” he said, adding that Plastic Bank sales people in Europe and North America go out and find customers that want to buy the material from its partners.
“We sell social plastic which is basically recycled plastic to provide feedstock for global manufacturing companies,” according to Guarin.
He said that there’s really a growing market for so-called purpose-driven products. 

“These are consumers who would like to buy from companies that have values aligned with them.
Plastic Bank also provides plastic credits. 

Guarin explained that plastic credit is one kilo of plastic waste that was collected, sold to a manufacturer and recycled. For companies to obtain plastic credit, we will collect for them,” he said. “We will assign to them what has been collected, what has been recorded, and what has been recycled by a company. And then we give that certificate to them. That certificate becomes part of their compliance report. And then at the end of the day, it’s audited by a third party. And then once it’s audited, we can include that in our reporting and resell it again.” 

Solid evidence

Another function of the PlasticBank app is helping orient collectors on quality. Users can access videos and DIYs to learn what kind of plastic should be taken, how to segregate them, how to clean them.

Primarily, the PlasticBank app helps spread back benefits to those who helped address plastic pollution by serving as solid evidence for all actions and results. 

Junk shops would consolidate locally and bring the plastic waste to aggregators for a bigger consolidation. The aggregators then transport this to processors, which then convert the plastic to either pellets or flakes. And then this would be shipped overseas.
“Within our technology, we manage the entirety of the transaction chain.

“So we know the collector when they return the material. We know which aggregator it went to. We then know which processor it went to,” Guarin said.

“The information and data it collects also can be used to support environmental, social and governance (ESG) claims and reports of companies,” he said.

Katz believe that the potential of the Plastic Bank and its app goes beyond alleviating poverty by providing livelihood to many families and beyond addressing the plastic pollution crisis.

“We can help organizations meet the sustainability goals, meet their ESG targets, because we’re anchored in circularity,” he said.

As the Department of Environment and Natural Resources implements the Extended Producers Responsibility Act of 2022, which requires large enterprises to share in diverting plastic waste from landfills and oceans, the Plastic Bank and PlasticBank app may come in handy in supporting their compliance with the mandate.