BEFORE the intensive campaign against single-use plastic even began, Alyssa Karin Pang was always conscious of the impact she makes to the environment since she was a kid.
“This advocacy is actually something very personal to me as my family is in the plastic manufacturing business,” shares Alyssa.
She believes that not one particular material, may it be plastic, glass or paper, is categorically better or worse than the other. “For any material, it really is the improper disposal and lack of recycling that poses the problem,” observes the Management of Applied Chemistry graduate from the Ateneo de Manila University.
That is why when she had a rebrand launch event for their family’s Natureal Juice recently, she emphasized how they want people to be more prudent on what they can do with the empty juice bottles.
“We encouraged our guests to be mindful of where they dispose these bottles and how they can actually reuse these BPA-free bottles for countless different things by recycling and upcycling them. We also gave them time and supplies to create an upcycling project out of the Natureal bottles,” details Alyssa.
Natureal is a proudly Davao-made brand that makes fresh juices from “100% real fruit, never from concentrate, and with absolutely no artificial color or preservatives”. Starting with their bestselling Calamansi, they have also come up with Mango Fusion, Passion Fruit, and other seasonal flavors.
“The reason why we use PET plastic bottles for our juices is because we have this new process that extends the shelf life of our fresh fruit juices, without using any heat and thereby not altering its color, taste or nutritional content. This process is called High Pressure Processing (HPP),” describes Alyssa.
She explained that “instead of using heat to process the juice to kill any living microbes that may contribute to spoilage, HPP does so with extremely high pressure, 6x that of the deepest depth of the earth, the Marianas Trench.”
“This process is only possible with our plastic packaging. Because unlike glass or metal which would break or get crushed in this process, plastic is flexible enough to take that level of pressure. We want to be able to provide our customers the best kind of juice we can offer for as long as it is possible. But as much as we want to extend our customers’ experience of our product, we also want to extend the lives of our bottles as well,” she reveals.
“And, to take a step even further, we also want to collect their Natureal bottles for recycling as well through drop-off points. For more than a decade now, our family has been using post-consumer plastics and turned these into durable plastic furniture called environment friendly timber (EFT) products which include park benches, plant boxes, lounge chairs, and picnic tables.
Now that she is back in Davao after living in Manila for seven years, Alyssa finds working in the family business as a different kind of challenge with its pros and cons.
“I have a greater sense of responsibility and empathy for my job which allows me to go beyond my specific job description to be and do more for the company. It likewise requires a lot of initiative and follow through. It’s definitely a challenge, but one with a sense of accomplishment once done,” Alyssa enthuses.
E-mail the author at mom.about.town.dvo@gmail.com. To view more photos, please visit http://momabouttowndavao.blogspot.com/.