Having visited the plastic bottle collection site in Langtang district of Nepal recently, it was wonderful to later be able to visit the first PET recycling centre in Pokhara where all of the bottles are processed and turned into pellets that can then be transformed into new products.
Himalayan Life Plastics is the social enterprise business that runs the PET plastic recycling processing plant, but our visit there proved that it is so much more than a Profit earning business. It is a company that has positive ethics at the very heart of all that it does – ethics that don’t just relate to environmental issues, but ethics that also impact the lives of all who are associated with the company.
Set up 13 years ago by a Swiss-Canadian investor and a team of Nepalese folk, the first plastic bottle collectors were the street boys of Pokhara. The team always had recycling of plastic bottles as their main focus, to reduce the increasing problem of plastic waste across the country, and provide an alternative to the toxic practice of burning the bottles as part of waste management within local communities. But right from the start, the team also wanted to impact some of the other social challenges that they were seeing, and one of these was the number of children living on the streets.
Some of them had been abandoned by parents who had gone overseas to seek work, others might have run from poverty, or abusive home situations. But whatever the reason, they were on the streets, and they didn’t know how to get off.
So, Himalayan Life Plastics (HLP) started tasking the street kids with collecting plastic bottles, and they would then pay them for the amount collected. HLP also gave mentoring support, helped with ensuring that they had ID cards (without an ID card there is no access to any formal support), and set up vocational training so that the young people not only earned some money from the bottles, but also had the opportunity to get a new trade. Street to school, and girl to school were two other programmes that HLP ran to help get the young people off the streets and into more positive and empowering life trajectories. HLP was the family that many of these young people didn’t have, and they also set up a drop-in centre so that there was somewhere for them to go at any time, and get help, encouragement, rebuild their self-respect, and know that there were people in whom they could trust.
In all 35 young people graduated from the vocational training, and many more passed through the programmes set up by HLP, earning money and regaining a grip on life. Even now, some of those young people who were living on the streets continue to work for HLP. They are married, they have their own families, and their kids go to school and live healthy lives – all things that seemed so out of their grasp just a few years back. In essence, they helped the street kids go from ‘no life to new life’.
I asked Prakash Bharati, the general manager of HLP, if there are still street kids collecting bottles in Pokhara. He replied that there aren’t, and when I asked why, he replied that there are no more street kids in Pokhara, as they have all been found homes, and if a new one appears, there are systems in place to help him/her straight away. What an impressive set of additional outcomes for a company that is primarily focused on recycling bottles.
HLP’s philosophy has always been ‘PEOPLE first, PLANET second, PROFIT third’, and this shows not just in the examples given of the street kids, but also with all those who are involved in HLP in any way. There are 56 employees at HLP. These include all those who work on the various stages of the processing lines – bottle cap removal, delabelling, sorting the bottles, loading the conveyor belts, overseeing the crushing and pellet cutting machines, and many other stages that I have probably failed to remember properly. Whilst there is a preferred minimum level of daily achievement re bottles processed, and pellets produced, the workers are still paid their basic wage whatever, and this is higher than the standard basic wage in Nepal. Health care contributions are also covered and as a result, HLP has a very good reputation as an employer, the work force enjoy coming to work, and they often meet over their quota as the working environment is so positive. HLP also seek to provide employment to widows, ex-street kids and other vulnerable community members where possible.
Plastic bottles are collected by communities around the country and trucked into Pokhara. CRED Partner PSD – Nepal oversees the collections from Langtang, but the collections also come in from all the mountain trekking areas, the cities, and beyond. All employees are paid at a good rate, such that an individual collector could expect to earn around 1000 rupees per day if they spent their whole day collecting bottles in their area.
Most of the bottles collected are recycled back into plastic bottles. This is partly due to technology available, but mainly because a plastic bottle can be recycled and recycled and recycled whereas once it is turned into something it’s recycling potential ends and it could end up as microplastics instead. The bottle caps however are recycled into new products – flower pots, pegs, key-rings etc, and HLP are now investigating the production of plastic yarn in response to a demand for it from overseas.
The challenges that HLP faces relate primarily to the tax system in Nepal that results in them having to pay more than one set of taxes. As well as VAT they have to pay a waste tax even though as a company they are running a business that is reducing the waste problem in Nepal. This double taxing is impacting their profits which in turn could impact wages, although at the moment they’ve managed to avoid that.
They are also finding it harder to recruit skilled workers for the more technical roles, as there is a tendency for young adults to be moving overseas in search of better paid work. As one person described it – there is a brawn drain to the Middle East, and a brain drain to the West and to Japan and SE Asia.
But despite all of that, there was still a definite sense of positivity in the air during our visit to HLP, and we all came away really inspired by all that is being achieved. The mountain of plastic bottles is evidence not just of the mountain of waste that was on the real mountains, but also of the progress that is being made in cleaning up those mountains and restoring them to their former beauty.
www.himalayanlife.com
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