Tokyo – The Alliance to End Plastic Waste held its first international forum at the Japan Business Federation (Keidanren Kaikan; Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo) in Japan on July 22, 2019. The forum introduced the Alliance to Japan, and focused on sharing best practices for raising awareness and advancing solutions for tackling the issue. After this, the opinion leaders in various fields related to plastic waste issues conducted a panel discussion where the panelists participated in a lively discussion that crossed country and industry boundaries. The presence of approximately 500 participants was an indicator of the high level of interest in this topic.
Hitoshi Ochi (President of Mitsubishi Chemical Holdings), a member of the Executive Committee of AEPW, noted that “as people recognise more and more of the need to tackle plastic waste issue as a common challenge to humanity, I am very happy to see that so many participants have indicated their interest in this issue, and attended the forum today. I hope that this forum will further increase public interest in AEPW’s activities, and I will be honoured if more of you can participate and support in them. I am hoping the day when we can get more wisdom and capabilities to resolve the issue of plastic waste will come as soon as possible”.
Ms. Helias, CSO at Procter & Gamble, stated the following. “We all agree that plastic doesn’t belong in our oceans or rivers or anywhere in our environment. We all agree that we have an important role to play in helping to end plastic waste in the environment. This is why the Alliance was created in January 2019. ”
Keiichi Iwata (President of Sumitomo Chemical Company) revealed his thoughts about joining the Alliance. “Part of our company’s corporate philosophy is ‘We always commit ourselves to creating new value by building on innovation’, and the issue of plastic waste is one of the important challenges that our company management will be addressing. We joined the AEPW and are planning to participate in international and cross-industry collaborations and share various information and resources, because we believe that these will accelerate our company’s diverse initiatives to achieve ‘Reduce, Reuse, Recycle’. I hope that this forum will further increase your interest in the issue of plastic waste, and that through the value chain, we at Sumitomo Chemical would like to work with more Japanese companies to resolve this issue.”
In addition, Tsutomu Tannowa (President of Mitsui Chemicals) commented on the role of building a recycling society and the role of AEPW. “In our attempt to promote the recycling of resources so as to address the issues revolving around plastics, our company has come up with a two-pronged approach of ‘Recycling Strategy’ to advance the development of recycling technologies and product design that takes into account the recyclability factor as well as ‘Biomass Strategy’ that aims to expand our lineup of products using biomass plastics. On the other hand, the establishment of a recycling society is one of the major challenges we face in infrastructure development. The AEPW is an alliance that can help to find solutions to difficult problems that cannot be easily resolved by individual companies in a short period of time from a global perspective. We will work together with people from all over the world involved in plastics on a global platform to propose new solutions through AEPW.”
The AEPW is a nonprofit organization composed of leading companies in various industries such as chemicals and plastics manufacturing, consumer goods, plastic processing, waste management that are involved in the entire plastic value chain from plastic manufacturing, processing, utilisation, sales, recovery and recycling. It also comprises members from around the globe, including North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The AEPW has committed to investing US$1.5 billion over the next five years to help end plastic waste in the environment. For more details, please visit us at https://endplasticwaste.org/.
