Lorenz Becomes a Partner of Plastic Bank
The snack manufacturer Lorenz has started a cooperation with the social enterprise “Plastic Bank”. The common goal is to prevent plastic from entering rivers and oceans while supporting poverty alleviation in countries of the global south.
The Lorenz subsidiary in Egypt signs a cooperation agreement with the environmental organization Plastic Bank, which includes the professional recycling of 20,000 kilograms of plastic waste. Founded in 2013 and based in Vancouver, Canada, Plastic Bank aims to build sustainable recycling systems in countries of the global South to combat both plastic pollution in oceans and poverty on the ground. The idea: people collect plastic waste from streets, beaches, and shores, take it to a Plastic Bank collection point and receive digital tokens in return, which can be exchanged for medical care, food, or wifi minutes for their phones, for example. Plastic Bank processes the collected plastics to put them back into the supply chain. The recycled plastic is used as “social plastic” raw material to make products and packaging.
“The concept of Plastic Bank complements very well our sustainability program in terms of Packaging. Our goal is to reduce our plastic use to the bare minimum and increase recyclability,” explains Ines Dzeko, Head of CSR at Lorenz in Neu-Isenburg. “In Egypt, there are no existing systems for recycling packaging materials and no infrastructure for waste management so far.” For this reason, she says, the Lorenz team on the ground has been looking for other solutions to contribute to greater sustainability in the area of packaging. “The fact that we are doing this in collaboration with the local people is a successful combination of environmental and social aspects,” Dezko continues.
