Plastic Bank’s Environmental Policy

Purpose

Our environmental policy states the company’s stand, its qualitative and quantitative goals, its governance and allocation of responsibilities, review mechanism, and specific scope on the five environmental topics deemed material to our type of industry, size, and location – Energy Consumption and GHG, Air Pollution, Hazardous Materials, Waste Management, and Environmental Services & Advocacy.  This is created to ensure that the long term environmental goals are communicated clearly to all employees and external stakeholders, and to ensure that accountabilities on monitoring and reporting are clear to achieve the goals. 

It is important to state that Plastic Bank does not own and operate any recycling facilities, aggregation centers, collection facilities and any other type of manufacturing facilities. It partners with existing plastic collection and recycling ecosystems, and we shall continue to work remotely from home. 

Scope of the company

All of Plastic Bank’s operating sites, and all employees under Plastic Bank in Canada, Indonesia, Philippines, Egypt, Brazil, Thailand and Cameroon.

Distribution

Internal: Read and Approved by ELT, Read and Understood by each Employee with document acceptance receipt via DEEL

External: Plastic Bank Website  

Policy statement

While Plastic Bank is committed to its advocacies on circularity, plastic waste reduction, and the ocean, it is also committed to improving and reporting its operational environment impact, and improving its environmental services.  Providing additional income, sharing knowledge, building capacity and establishing common outcomes within our communities, partners and processors is our way to provide them with climate change adaptation and resilience support. We choose to  operate in countries with high rates of plastic pollution and poverty. Many such countries lack proper waste management infrastructure and have a greater dependency on single-use packaging for clean and sterile goods. This results in a disproportionate amount of plastic pollution.

We aim at the following:

	Qualitative Goals	Quantitative Goals	Strategies
Energy consumption and GHG	Reduce business energy consumption and emissions	Reduce business energy usage and GHG emissions by 25%1 from employee’s commuting or private transport, and in office electricity2 by 2027.  Reduce emissions by 10% until 2030 from transport of goods.	Increase implementation of  remote work with resources to create home offices, and elimination of travel to work. KPI % work from home YOY. Monitor energy consumption reduction efforts of processors and report annually. No company owned vehicles policy. Full digital, paperless. Note: Impact of IT equipment for home offices is insignificant.2
Air Pollution Prevention	Reduce air pollution	Reduce business related air pollution by 25%1 from employee’s commuting or private transport
Hazardous Materials	Prevent / Discontinue use of  Hazardous Materials	Zero hazardous materials in all business operations year on year	Continue to ensure REACH compliance of its Social Plastic when supported by customers to prevent scaling up any plastic grade that contains hazardous chemicals above regulation levels at time of testing, and make sure that REACH lab analysis results are available .
Waste Management	Eliminate business related waste in offices Ensure all packaging used in transporting its Social Plastic is monitored and reported	Maintain Zero waste from office work. 100% of packaging used in the transport of Social Plastic is managed correctly at end-of-life 90% of packaging used in the transport of Social Plastic are renewable, reusable, recyclable, or optimized to ensure they are not over designed.	Work-from home Full digital, paperless. Awareness on how big bags are handled by the end user after use to ensure that they are managed correctly. Use of wooden and plastic pallets. Use of the most optimum specification of wrappers.
Environmental services & advocacy	Grow plastic waste reduction advocacy with collection and diversion services offered in countries of operation.	Increase plastic waste collected and diverted to recycling by 15% year on year	Sustain community awareness and training while setting up ecosystems according to standards.

¹ Greenhouse gas emissions under work from home vs. office: An activity-based individual-level accounting model

² Remote vs office : Which one is greener?

Governance and Allocation of Responsibilities

This policy and its implementation is governed by the Chief Supply Officer, with support from the Chief Technology officer,  the Chief Marketing Officer, and HR forming the ELT environmental governance committee leads

The policy is authored by the sustainability director with support from the supply chain market heads for implementation, global customer service planning and logistics director for annual reporting, marketing for external publication of policy and report, and HR for internal distribution to employees and records.

Review Mechanism, Monitoring and Reporting

This policy must be reviewed every 3 years under the leadership of the sustainability director.

The following (not limiting) must be annually reported and monitored for improvements:

% employees working from home

% energy consumption reduced by processors

% REACH compliance

% packaging end of life managed sustainably

% growth in plastic waste collection and diversion

Revision History

Version #	Date	Reason for Revision
1	20 Sep 2024	Original (integrates previous policies on GHG, Energy, Water, Hazardous Material & Waste, and adds a section on Environmental Services and Advocacy)