Unilever and SM team up for a campaign to encourage shoppers to do their share in the environment movement by using the modernized bayong.

The bayong became relevant once more when SM and Unilever Philippines recently joined hands to introduce to the public a reusable shopping bag as part of their campaign to promote environmentalism in the country.

Chito Macapagal, vice president for corporate development of Unilever Philippines, says the campaign aims to promote awareness to shoppers of using recycled shopping bags, which SM expects will reduce the demand for plastic shopping bags.

Called the GreenBag, the 19-by-17-inch bag is the initial project of the SM Concerned and Responsible Eco-Shoppers (SM Cares) and also the first with Unilever.

Macapagal says they decided to bring back the spirit of the bayong with new shopping concepts to make it relevant to the times by making it reusable.

Although the GreenBag is nonbiodegradable, it is built with recyclable polypropylene or Plastic No. 5, a nontoxic and allergy-free element commonly used for food containers, toothbrushes and surgical fabrics.

“Being not biodegradable is beside the point. The most important thing is that we made a right step,” says Macapagal in an interview with BusinessMirror.

The Chinese-made shopping bag can now be brought in all 28 branches of SM nationwide. For the first three months, GreenBags will be given for every P500 worth of SM Supermarket Yellow Tag items, inclusive of one Unilever product. SM Advantage Card holders will be given two extra points every time they use the GreenBag for their groceries. A maximum of three GreenBags can be used per supermarket transaction.

Since the program started in January, some 20,000 GreenBags have been imported and distributed to the participating supermarkets.

The initial response of the shoppers is an indication they are gradually developing awareness on environmental issues. “There is that level of environmental consciousness, after all, which is a very good sign,” says Macapagal.

“We just hope people will find a very good avenue to do something good for the environment. We try to make it fashionable, [it] adds to the motivation of the people,” he adds.

For its initial run, the bags cost between P3 million and P4 million.

Macapagal said the purpose of the GreenBag was not to eradicate the use of plastic but to start a new shopping habit—the responsible use of grocery bags among SM supermarket customers.

The beauty of the GreenBag campaign is that it does not call for the banning of plastics. For Macapagal, this is the most realistic approach because big complications will be created when plastics are banned.

“We should be pragmatic enough to realize that plastic should not be totally banned. Instead, it should be recycled, thus the reusable plastic bag was born,” says Macapagal.

Unilever and SM are looking to make the GreenBag campaign long-term. Unilever and SM are already studying the possibility of making the bag biodegradable in the near future.

On the legislative side, Macapagal says Sen. Miriam Defensor-Santiago has committed total support to the recycling campaign by filing a bill in the Senate to institutionalize recycling in the country.

“The aim is to minimize, if not eliminate, the use of one-use shopping bags only. What we noticed was that solid-waste management is plaguing the environment. We also observed that most of the nonrecycled materials in the landfill areas were shopping bags,” he said.

SM and Unilever also plan to put up a Green Wall containing the names of shoppers using GreenBags to recognize their contributions in the campaign.

At present, there are plans to invite other supermarkets to pursue related campaigns.

“We will be happy. I think that’s the best compliment they can give. It’s for the good of the country, and nobody owns the concept of the bayong. Filipinos own it,” says Macapagal.

At present, the key objective is to get more people to participate to remind them that eventually, it is going to affect them if they do not do their share in saving the environment.

“It’s also going to affect their children and even their grandchildren if they don’t act now,” he points out.

Being the leading manufacturer of home and personal-care products, foods and ice cream, Unilever takes environmentalism and its corporate social responsibility program seriously.

“We have checked our own programs just to find out that we have a high level of implementation of solid-waste management,” says Macapagal.

“We cannot campaign on waste if we ourselves are not doing our waste-conservation program. We don’t have the moral ascendancy to pursue the undertaking,” he adds.

As part of their solid-waste management, Unilever has managed, through the auspices of environmentalist Narda Camacho, to convert leftover materials from its packaging materials into hollow blocks.

These hollow blocks are donated to the Smokey Mountain and Gawad Kalinga housing projects. Unilever has its own village in Gawad Kalinga wherein the hollow blocks used in the construction came from the recycles materials.

Although the cost of the hollow blocks is higher, Macapagal believes the extra cost will be the driver for the company to find ways of doing it cheaper in the future.

“We just tell the business community to look at it as a levy for the waste we dump in the landfill. Why not use the amount of money and do something worthwhile and provide a less impact to the environment,” Macapagal said.

“We don’t do it for the sake of complying. We want to do it and raise the bar of compliance. We want to be in the frontier of things.” n

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