When it comes to our impact-driven entrepreneurial programs, close collaboration with major stakeholders is crucial to achieve meaningful impact in the delivery of world-changing solutions. At the Zero Waste Living Lab, one way we can do this is by joining forces together with FMCGs and their packaging suppliers, to whom plastic is an integral part of business. In recent years, big brands have been increasing effort to reduce their hefty plastic footprints by looking for better packaging alternatives. By teaming up with these companies, we have the opportunity to showcase our reuse solutions and highlight possibilities for integration into their business practices, accelerating their efforts to become more sustainable.
For our ventures, such partnerships means larger impact
That is why we are thrilled to announce a new partnership between Enviu’s Zero Waste Living Lab and global packaging supplier ALPLA. This collaboration will primarily involve Koinpack, a reuse venture in our program that offers a sustainable alternative to single-use plastic sachets by delivering products in reusable bottles — a type of packaging that ALPLA has a great wealth of expertise in manufacturing.
As explained by Enviu’s Indonesia Country Director Jesse van de Zand, designing bottles for reuse is no easy feat: “You need to make sure that they are durable and able to protect the product from contamination, they must prevent leakage of the contents, and they need to be able to withstand being washed multiple times without the material wearing out. Essentially, there are many important design criteria that reusable containers need to fulfill, you can’t easily find these in bottles bought off the shelf. That’s why you really need to find the right support and the right expertise. That’s why we have partnered with ALPLA.”
A joint effort to accelerate the transition from single-use sachets to reusables
Koinpack’s solution to plastic waste involves a tech-enabled, circular system that offers customers easy access to daily needs products in refillable bottles. The system is spread through the network of warungs (local frequency stores) and waste banks (informal waste management facilities) across Indonesia, enabling both resellers and their customers to skip the single-use sachet altogether. “The partnership with ALPLA aims to ensure that Koinpack’s reusable bottles attain the highest level of quality, have a long lifespan, are easy to maintain, and communicate the product’s brand in an attractive way,” says Jesse.
ALPLA has been an industry leader in innovative packaging for decades. To set the scene for a circular plastics economy, the company has added reusable packaging to its research and development agenda in recent years, accumulating a significant amount of expertise in the design and manufacture of high-quality reusables. According to Jesse, this advanced understanding of circular solutions is what prompted the partnership between ALPLA and Koinpack: “ALPLA has the right knowledge on how circular supply chains work. This knowledge is extremely helpful for our ventures, whose business models are based on such circular systems.”
What it means for the future of our reuse ventures and their fight against plastic pollution
A long-time leading expert in the global packaging industry, ALPLA supplies packaging to an extensive network of FMCG companies across a wide range of markets, including those that sell personal and home care products. This is exactly the line of products that Koinpack, as well as its sister venture QYOS, currently offer to their customers. With this in mind, ALPLA’s high-quality packaging not only serves to facilitate Koinpack’s reusable system but further enables the venture to scale its reuse solution from warung stores and waste banks to a wide variety of businesses in Indonesia and beyond.