Catching Up With AgriWrap: An Introduction To The New Team

Hello all! Welcome to a new chapter of AgriWrap. With our first blog post of this year we are excited to introduce the new team of undergraduate students working on this project. The four new students have various engineering and science backgrounds. With our different academic clichés we all come together through our shared interest in sustainability and positive global impact.

As we begin our fieldwork this year we would like to reiterate our general purpose and goals for this project. Currently, the Philippines contributes a large amount of plastic waste in the ocean. AgriWrap aims to reduce this plastic waste by encouraging a sustainable packaging alternative.

While the previous team focused on researching how to turn agricultural waste into a sustainable packaging alternative, our current team realized that we needed a change of direction with our project. In collaboration with the HEED students at the University of Philippines Diliman and Jonathan Co from Sentinel Upcycling, we found that sustainable packaging is already available in the Philippines for businesses in the food industry to purchase. Although this sustainable packaging is available, it is not widely in use for the majority of food businesses, primarily the smaller food vendors and carts found around the Philippines. To better understand why, we will look into two main issues that present challenges to sustainable packaging usage: marketing this packaging and properly managing biodegradable waste. Our goal for this first week in Manila is to find how AgriWrap can help bridge that gap and promote using sustainable packaging and good waste management strategies in food businesses.

Our team has dedicated to focus on plastic generated from street vendors as opposed to larger scale companies and manufacturers. These markets are heavily reliant on single use plastics, and often do not have the means to opt for the more expensive biodegradable packaging. Over the next two weeks we will survey the scene to figure out where we can make the most impact. One avenue to consider is replacing the plastic films that food is wrapped in with a more sustainable option. We plan to accomplish this by speaking with street vendors and visiting markets to better understand what factors go into selecting packaging and what might cause hesitation to use biodegradable packaging. We will conduct extensive market research on street vendors in the Philippines to best understand what specific venture we would like to focus on.

Additionally, we were fortunate enough to set up a meeting with SACHI-Group, a company that produces sustainable packaging. We are also reaching out to other sustainability packaging manufacturers and organizations interested in reducing plastic waste in hopes of gaining their perspectives on the usage of biodegradable packaging. From this we hope to gain insight into the process required to manufacture biodegradable packaging. Jonathan Co from Sentinel Upcycling has been a big help in acquiring these connections and reaching out to them.

With this new direction, AgriWrap can find an area that needs to be positively impacted in order to work towards the ultimate goal of reducing plastic waste. From our market research surveying small food vendors in the next few days we will also find more direction for our remaining time in the Philippines.