Asiaphile

Deja view

In the time that Srinivasan Prabhushankar spent talking to delegates at the February Petcore Europe AGM in Brussels, Belgium, his company’s plants had recycled 1.5 million bottles. The chief executive of recycling at Indorama Ventures (IVL) in the US was busy outlining the sustainability mission of the Thailand-headquartered petrochemical giant, which has designs on recycling 50 billion PET bottles per year by 2025. Today, with...

Any volunteers?

Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) is not new to Vietnam. It was formalised nearly two decades ago with directions on the recovery and disposal of expired or discarded products. The EPR model that applied from 2005 until 2020 was, however, based on a voluntary mechanism and was therefore viewed by many as relatively ineffective. The decision was made in 2020 to transition from a voluntary EPR...

Circling Vietnam’s economy

As an accelerating economic power in Southeast Asia, with a rapidly growing middle class, Vietnam has severe environmental issues, particularly in waste management and...

India’s plastics ban flounders

Just six months after the Indian Central Government issued a sweeping ban on single-use plastics (SUP), implementation has been sluggish, if not quite a...

China struggles with biodegradables

China’s announcement of bans and restrictions on non-degradable plastics packaging back in January 2020 – plastics shopping bags, cutlery, e-commerce wrapping and so on...

Rolling back the tide – a false narrative

An influential 2015 environmental report on the impact and solutions to ocean plastics pollution has been ‘retracted’, because of what one of the publishing...

Japanese juggling act

Japanese people place great value on healthy and high-quality food, which they have traditionally preferred to buy fresh and unpackaged. Those traditions were tested...

India’s EPR looms on the horizon

In tandem with India’s amended Plastic Waste Management (PWM) Rules 2022, which are aimed at restricting or banning single-use plastics, effective 1 July 2022,...

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