Walk into one of Chile’s neighbourhood convenience stores, and you will see refill machines emblazoned with the name “Algramo”. Customers bring reusable containers – each fitted with a unique RFID tag – to refill daily essentials such as shampoo, washing-up liquid and detergent. They can also order refills to their door and pay via a phone app.
Refill services like these are pivotal to addressing the plastic pollution crisis, experts say. Reducing consumption of single-use plastic products, including bottles and containers, can decrease the 430 million tonnes of plastic humanity produces a year, two-thirds of which are short-lived products that soon become waste.
Crucially, the cost of Algramo products per gram is the same no matter how little or how much customers buy. Alleviating the “poverty tax,” which forces those with lower incomes to incur higher expenses for not buying in bulk, is the central goal of Chilean start-up Algramo – meaning “by the gram” in Spanish.
Companies such as Algramo, which was established in 2013, illustrate the economic benefits of tackling this issue and reimagining humanity’s relationship with plastic. As its founder and CEO José Manuel Moller has said, “People are deciding between their pocket or their planet, so we need to be cheaper and better.”
“Our customers pay for the packaging only on the first purchase,” says Algramo’s brand manager, Cristobal Undurraga. “This enables families to pay about 40 per cent less for life’s essentials due to the overprice that products in small formats usually have.”
With one-third of all plastics produced used just once and thrown away, solutions to the plastic pollution crisis must follow a life-cycle approach, according to a United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) Turning off the Tap report released yesterday. This entails reducing plastic pollution at all stages of a product’s life cycle and encouraging reuse.
“We must eliminate unnecessary plastic,” said Elisa Tonda, Chief of the Resources and Markets Branch at UNEP. “The food and beverage industry is the main source of plastic waste in developing countries and is responsible for 9 of the 10 most common items picked up during beach clean ups.”
Shifting the needle on the use of plastic will require a system change that addresses the causes of plastic pollution and creates market opportunities, says Tonda. “Governments, businesses and the finance sector need to incentivize the reduction in plastic consumption, encourage plastic reuse, ban unnecessary plastic packaging and products, invest in recycling, and commit to partnerships that tackle plastic pollution,” she added.
According to Undurraga, among the biggest challenges the company faced was changing the way big companies treated plastic.
“Companies have set up their teams and their providers to work following a linear model, in which, after the product is sold, the packaging has no relevance to them,” he says. “We propose the opposite: once a product is sold, it is the company’s responsibility to keep that packaging in the economy and out of the environment, and we are here to help facilitate that transition.”
The company has expanded outside Chile; earlier this year, it trialled its vending machines in a branch of Lidl in the West Midlands in the UK, allowing customers to refill four types of Lidl’s own-brand laundry detergent. Algramo is also trialling vending machines in partnership with Nestle in Indonesia for its Milo and Koko Krunch products. The start-up has vending machines in New York and is preparing to enter the Mexican market.
While each market has its own challenges around plastic pollution, Undurraga says the issue needs a global response.
“Chile has more than 6,000 kilometres of coastline, so the pollution of our oceans is much more evident than in other countries, but (there are places) that are literally flooded by plastic because of the bad practices of global industries and governments. We have to face this as a global problem.”
Given that only 9 per cent of plastic is recycled globally each year, reusing plastic containers is far preferable to putting them in the recycling bin.
“We need to stop believing in the fantasy that recycling is the solution for waste management,” Undurraga says.
“We are never going to be able to recycle the amount of plastic we are producing. If you really think about it, it's absurd to collect plastic to recycle it in order to make another plastic and then all over again, instead of just reusing something over and over and over, and creating value and convenience,” he adds.
Since 2020, Algramo customers have reused more than 900,000 pieces of packaging, equivalent to more than 100,000 kilograms of plastic that would have become waste. Consumer desire – and economic incentives – are there to revolutionize how we produce, consume and reuse our plastic products.
However, it is also clear that government intervention is needed, experts say.
“The private sector has proved over and over that the environment is not above profits, so we need regulations to make them act. Governments (can play a huge role) in this,” Undurraga says. “We need carrots and sticks, incentives for companies that are doing well and the right penalties for companies that are not.”
Governments are making progress, with the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee which will reconvene this month, to forge an international legally binding instrument on plastic pollution by the end of 2024. This year’s World Environment Day will focus on solutions to the plastic pollution crisis, further reinforcing the need for governments around the world to recognize that a multilateral approach is needed to change the way humanity designs, produces and consumes plastic products.
About World Environment Day
World Environment Day on 5 June is the biggest international day for the environment. Led by UNEP and held annually since 1973, the event has grown to be the largest global platform for environmental outreach, with millions of people from across the world engaging to protect the planet. This year, World Environment Day will focus on solutions to the plastic pollution crisis.
