08-Jan-2022 Intellasia |
Nikkei |
5:02 AM
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Twice a week, Veritas Vietnam staff drop by Starbucks to pick up old coffee grounds, from which the company concocts shoes, cups, and masks for clients like Mercedes and InterContinental Hotels.
It is an alluring proposition: Reduce waste by making goods less harmful to begin with by replacing plastic with organic inputs. This is one of several strategies underpinning the concept of a “circular economy,” meant to replace today’s throwaway culture with products that last.
With a new law in place, Vietnam has joined the circular economy bandwagon. Companies from Apple to Asahi Breweries are now required to keep more of their products, parts and packaging out of landfills.
Whether the promise of a circular economy becomes reality, however, depends on businesses. Some may eliminate waste from the supply chain, while others find that little can change without less consumption. Still others may dress up their brands with this latest eco-buzzword.
“Brands are under pressure from customers and legislators,” said Thanh Le, founder and director of Veritas. “Some want to change; some need a law” to force change.
In a linear economy, companies use resources to make goods that customers buy and discard. A circular economy, by contrast, keeps those resources circulating for as long as possible, such as by redesigning goods with materials that are easy to reuse.
Key to that goal is extended producer responsibility (EPR), a concept that is gaining traction globally and which Vietnam adopted in a revised Environmental Protection Law that took effect January 1.
With EPR rules, companies’ responsibility no longer ends at the point of sale but extends to disposal.
Vietnam’s new law gives big companies two choices: recycle, or pay up. They must have systems to collect their goods once customers are done with them, extract materials with value and dispose of the rest. If not, they pay into an environmental fund or face a fine.
Apple, HP, Panasonic and others have programmes to retrieve the very electronics that have contributed to consumer-driven waste. The new law is intended to scale up such programmes.
“Businesses cannot sign up superficially,” Kim Le, co-founder of circularity consultancy CL2B, told Nikkei Asia. “If a circular economy is going to happen, it has to be systemic change.”
She noted some unhelpful trends, including planned obsolescence and opposition to the right to repair.
Criticised on both fronts, Apple increased the use of recycled parts in the iPhone and iPad and will back self-service repairs in 2022. The company declined to comment but pointed to its environmental report, which set a goal of sending “zero waste” to the dump.
Its AirPods are assembled at a Goertek factory, Vietnam’s first plant to get certification from US-based UL that at least 90 percent of its waste has been diverted from landfills, the report said.
Zero-waste advocates around the world work to design waste out of production and consumption from the start. Strategies include creating goods with inputs that can decompose or be recovered, switching from single-use to reusable or refillable designs, reducing consumerism itself and finding new uses for byproducts.
Billing itself as Asia’s first zero-waste beer maker, for example, 7 Bridges Brewing makes soap from old hops and yeast, and uses spent grain for pizza and animal feed. Vietnamese media abounds with stories of people turning crab shells into leathery clothes, masks into construction materials and tarps into backpacks.
But recycling should be a last resort and can be costly, environmentalists say. Kim Le said very few materials, like tin and copper, retain enough value to be recycled. And the process is further complicated when materials get contaminated. She added that people draw a false sense of comfort in believing their waste is repurposed. For example, 91 percent of plastic is not recycled despite marketing campaigns suggesting otherwise.
Thanh Le of Veritas warned that many people are not willing to give up convenience and affordability for the environment, while companies may “greenwash” their image with eco-slogans.
Already the world’s seventh-largest source of ocean plastic, Vietnam is wary of also becoming a dumping ground for the world’s e-waste. That is why the new law is needed to tackle pollution for both environmental and health reasons, attorney Minh Nguyen said.
“In the pandemic we learned a very valuable lesson, which is that money cannot buy your health,” said Nguyen, a senior associate at ACSV Legal, adding that companies will need to spend money to comply with the eco-law. “It will be painful, but it is the part that we have to go through before it is too late for everyone.”
https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Environment/Vietnam-aims-for-circular-economy-with-recycling-law
Category: Business, Vietnam
Article source: https://www.intellasia.net/vietnam-aims-for-circular-economy-with-recycling-law-1005166