Topics covered in this episode:
- Intro About Plastic Bank by Ray Ng
- How people find plastic in their everyday life and how used plastics turn in currency
- The surprising solution to Ocean Plastic.
- What should merchants do in the coming future?
Episode Length 20:34
We will be discussing about Plastic Bank, Today with Ray Ng, the founder of Unipro Hong Kong – Your Hong Kong local partner global corporate services in Hong Kong who will be helping us understand more about this.
[4:18] Intro About Plastic Bank by Ray Ng
Plastic Bank is actually an organisation that create an amazing ecosystem that they would receive the plastics that you collected, and in return they would offer you either money or a credit for you to purchase daily items. If you go to browse their website, there are merchants producing environmentally friendly products such as Shampoos, bracelets, gel, umbrella etc. and all of them are using packing or materials that are not in plastics. You can use the credit you earned to buy those items. I think it is a smart way because right now government are thinking about penalties, but this organisation instead is finding ways to offer incentives to people who help collecting these plastics. I saw one of the locations that they are helping is actually Philippine.
[9:28] How people find plastic in their everyday life and how used plastics turn in currency
If we want to help the society, we can use more reusable plastics, for example, reusable shopping bags. I do believe you will see more products would have an environmentally friendly marks placed on their packaging. We shall support them by purchasing these items on higher priority. In Hong Kong, I know some merchants also suggest customers to bring their own container when they go to purchase. My friend carries his own lunchbox to buy meals from a restaurant. It’s less convenient, but it’s understandable.
[12:18] The surprising solution to Ocean Plastic.
I remember there was a kid from Holland who started a campaign some years ago to clean the ocean. I just checked from the website. His name is Boyan Slat, CEO of The Ocean Cleanup.
It all started when then 16-year-old Boyan Slat was scuba diving in Greece and was surprised to see more plastic than fish. What surprised him even more, after digging deeper into the plastic pollution problem, was no one had made serious attempts to combat this issue. The question “Why don’t we just clean it up?” lingered in his mind, and led him to devote his high school science project to understanding the problem, as well as researching why a cleanup was considered impossible.
As of today, I think they have already implemented the project in a scalable way. What plastic bank does is in another angle. They are trying to put efforts on stop creating more new plastics.
I also heard some businesses are trying to turn plastics into energy.
[16:50] What should merchants do in the coming future?
I think as an entrepreneurs, we better get well prepared for this trend. Government would definitely impose stricter requirements on using environmentally unfriendly products. Therefore, if you are a manufacturer, get prepared to adopt the reusable materials. If you are a retailer, get prepared to adopt policies of having your customers to bring their own containers. If you are an ecommerce-seller, get prepared to use reusable material for your packaging. Whenever there are new policies, new opportunities are there.