Did you know that Thailand is the 6th biggest contributor of marine plastic litter?
In 2017 the country reached an amount of 4.93 million tons of plastic waste, from which only 10% got recovered. Although the Thai political trends for the upcoming years look promising, so far very little has been done to avoid plastic pollution, and the country is just starting to embrace more sustainable policies, such as promoting alternative and biodegradable products, increasing the plastic waste recycling within the next years to at least 60% [1]...
People are also awakening, but unfortunately in a slowly pace: Thai society strongly relies on plastic packaging, such as bags, food containers… and even though they see the problem in them, they will not renounce to the comfort that those products offer.
Yes, the political regulations are great. But the real changes occur when the consumers change their buying paradigms. So why do we focus so much on recycling? Instead, we believe that the answer for the real awakening of the Thai society relies in offering more sustainable and reusable products.
But don’t think that the whole responsibility relies on Thai society.
Tourists are strongly harming the island’s ecosystems, and after conducting a beach clean-up on Koh Kood, we can confirm the impact of this sector, whose most consumed single use plastic product are the PET bottles. Seeing those amounts of trash made us want to figure out how tourists really feel about it. And the answer was always the same: guilty.
That is why we find important to offer sustainable and reusable products to hotels and restaurants, who also feel responsible for the impact they have on their island.
We had the chance to introduce our first product, the glassic bottle, to 11 of hotels, and they all saw in it the solution the island needs to keep breathing.
After receiving such a positive feedback, we came back to Munich, Germany very motivated to keep going on our final stage of the project. The production site is completed and currently we are just waiting for the machinery. Therefore, we are very excited to say that we expect to start our production by January 2020.
Stay tuned on our next updates and how we impact our planet for the good.
[1] Lab of Tomorrow Insights, on behalf of Impact Hub Berlin.