Tirta Investama, the company behind Danone-Aqua, Indonesia’s oldest and largest bottled water brand, has pledged to recover and recycle more plastics from the environment by 2025.
Within the next seven years, the local unit of French food giant Danone said in statement on Wednesday (06/06) that it will recover more plastic than it uses and increase the proportion of recycled plastic in its bottles to 50 percent from 11 percent currently.
“Today Danone-Aqua delivers more than two-thirds of our water in returnable, reusable jugs. More than half of our PET [polyethylene terephthalate] bottles are already being collected and recycled into new bottles or other materials, such as textiles. But we have decided the time is right to invest further and to do more,” Tirta Investama president director Corine Tap said in the statement.
The company signed up Sumber Alfaria Trijaya, the operator of Alfamart, one of Indonesia’s largest convenience store chains; digital app developer Smash; and the country’s largest mobile operator Telkomsel last month to install drop boxes for shoppers to recycle their bottles.
The drop boxes allow shoppers to exchange used plastic bottles for points in Telkomsel’s T-Cash digital wallet. Tirta Investama aims to have drop boxes installed at all Alfamart convenience stores to serve 100 million consumers by 2025.
“We want to encourage and educate consumers to be more creative in collecting and recycling their plastic waste into something of better value,” said Ivan Hermawan, general manager of corporate communication at Sumber Alfaria.
Tirta Investama is also collaborating with other companies, including H&M, the world’s second-largest fashion retailer, and it has joined alliances such as the Packaging and Recycling Alliance for Indonesia Sustainable Environment (Praise) and the Indonesian Plastic Recycling Association (Adupi), to curb plastic waste.
According to the Ministry of Environment and Forestry, Indonesians throw away around 9 million tons of plastic every year, with most of it ending up in landfills, clogging waterways or being washed away to into the ocean, damaging marine life.
The government aims to reduce plastic waste by 70 percent by 2025 and it has also committed up to $1 billion annually to removing plastic debris from its seas.