What does it take to shift an entire consumer economy away from single-use plastics? Alner Co-Founder and CEO Bintang Ekananda has been answering that question from Jakarta’s warungs to a London conference stage.
Bintang recently joined policymakers, corporate partners and development practitioners at the FCDO Global Partnerships Conference in London, where he shared Alner’s journey as part of a panel on what genuinely effective collaboration between impact enterprises, corporates, and funders looks like in practice.
The conversation was grounded in Alner’s experience with TRANSFORM, a decade-long impact accelerator led by Unilever, the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, and EY, which brings together corporates, donors, investors and academics to support visionary impact enterprises across Africa and Asia. Since its launch in 2015, TRANSFORM has supported over 140 impact enterprises worldwide, reaching more than 19 million lives.
Alner has been one of those enterprises. Indonesia’s first tech-enabled reusable packaging system, Alner eliminates single-use plastics by offering daily household essentials in reusable bottles, operating through a deposit-return model across community-based sales points. The challenge it is solving is significant: Indonesia produces 6.8 million tonnes of plastic waste annually, and only about 10% is recycled, with single-use flexible packaging such as sachets making up around 76% of mismanaged waste.
The learnings from Alner’s collaboration with TRANSFORM are now captured in the programme’s newly launched playbook, How to Collaborate for Impact, covering everything from partnership design to scaling impact enterprises in emerging markets.
Read the full playbook here.
