Building Local Capacity for Zero-Waste in the Philippines: Q&A with Break Free From Plastic’s Former Asia-Pacific Coordinator Beau Baconguis
Large pollution can come in small packages. This is the case with the small plastic pouches, called sachets, that constitute a major source of the plastic waste crisis plaguing the Philippines, a country ranked third in the world for ocean plastic leakage. Filipino consumers throw away a staggering 163 million of these difficult-to-recycle plastic packets each day, which adds up to about 60 billion a year, enough to carpet 130,000 soccer fields.
For twenty years, Beau Baconguis has worked on toxic chemical pollution, plastic waste, and environmental and social justice issues in the Philippines. Beau got her start at the environmental conservation group, Haribon Foundation, where she worked to pass the Ecological Solid Waste Management Act of 2000, groundbreaking national legislation that established a formal waste collection system in the Ph