When a law becomes the problem

Wonder why plastic continues to clog our drainage and invade our waterways four years after a law was precisely crafted to solve this plastic problem?

The short answer is that Congress enacted an amendatory law that is highly selective in mandating which businesses must reduce, recover, and recycle plastic waste. Strangely, the Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) Act of 2022 exempts 99 percent of registered businesses nationwide from these requirements. The long answer is covered in the Inquirer’s special report on the country’s plastic crisis (see “Low consumption, high leakage: The Philippines’ plastic paradox,” 5/21/26).

Republic Act No. 9003, the Ecological Solid Waste Management Act of 2000, established the country’s primary legal framework for the segregation, recycling, diversion, and disposal of solid waste. After more than two decades, Congress enacted RA 11898, the EPR Act of 2022, which finally assigned responsibility to manufacturers of products using plastic packaging, enabling them to recover, recycle, and reuse the waste they generate.

The EPR Act covers the very producers of plastic packaging who had not previously been legally responsible for the avalanche of solid waste, including sachets, in our midst. The Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives estimated that Filipinos discard 164 million used sachets daily—or 60 billion single-use packets annually—”enough to bury the entire Metro Manila under a foot of sachets,” according to the Inquirer special report.

But, shockingly, the EPR law covers only large enterprises with assets exceeding P100 million or employing 200 or more employees. EPR exempts micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) from the compulsory waste-reduction requirement to recover or remove the equivalent of the carbon footprint of their plastic products. Yet MSMEs are the most numerous, accounting for 99.6 percent of all registered businesses in the country.

Why did Congress exempt MSMEs, opting instead to simply “encourage” them to voluntarily adopt their own schemes to reclaim their plastic packaging? A better approach would have been to include all businesses and mandate sectoral adoption of EPR, allowing even smaller businesses within the same enterprise to band together and pool resources to implement EPR.

When environmentalists asked for an official explanation, they were told that the exemption was intended to protect MSMEs from the “financial and operational burdens of an EPR policy,” according to Jashaf Shamir Lorenzo, deputy executive director of Ban Toxics (bantoxics.org).

Reusability and redesign. But this “may be countered by adopting more sustainable practices” that are endemic to communities, said Lorenzo in an interview with this columnist. He cited that the “deposit systems where consumers are asked to return their used bottles to stores in exchange for deposit fees … have been used in the Philippines informally during pre-plastic times. Refill stations have also become more popular these days in both formal and informal settings.”

“In a sense, prioritizing systems’ changes and product designs [to push for reusability and minimize waste potential] may be the path forward with MSMEs, in recognition of the difficulties of conducting large-scale waste recovery operations. Clear guidance on waste minimization and specific targets for plastics production reduction [which could force plastics industries to rethink and redesign their products] are needed,” he stressed.

Recall that the law also mandates the “development of environment-friendly products that advocate … sustainable consumption and production, circular economy, and producers’ full responsibility throughout the life cycle of their product.”

But the law’s implementation leaves much to be desired.

“I think the biggest flaw [of the law] is that the EPR focuses on downstream measures such as waste recovery, with no strong mandate to reduce plastic production. As per the Waste Hierarchy [as outlined in the Basel Convention’s Environmentally-Sound Management Framework], an approach that focuses on downstream measures may not be as effective as upstream measures that are designed to reduce actual production [measures may include production reduction/reuse/redesign] of material that will eventually become waste,” noted Lorenzo.

What the manufacturers and producers have missed so far is the principle behind the law: establishing a circular economy. The law defines a circular economy as an economic model that creates value by extending product lifespans through improved design and servicing and by shifting manufacturers’ focus from the end of the supply chain to the beginning—or what Lorenzo described as “upstream measures.”

To do so, manufacturers must operate under a circular economy paradigm in which preventing waste is factored in from the outset of production, and promoting the reuse of products and materials, rather than allowing them to become waste that needs to be recycled, is integral to this paradigm shift.

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