Author: Hannah Alcoseba Fernandez
The Philippines’ extended producer’s responsibility (EPR) law, which requires big companies to recover their plastic footprint, aims to encourage the people collecting the waste to turn their trade into a more formal privately held business, said a plastics recycling industry expert. “We have to build the infrastructure for the informal waste system and try to formalise and develop them [waste pickers] into entrepreneurs because that is what they are in their own right,” Crispian Lao, founder of the Philippine Alliance for Recycling and Materials Sustainability (PARMS), told Eco-Business.