The Chilean start-up changing our relationship with plastic

Walk into one of Chile’s neighbourhood convenience stores, and you will see refill machines emblazoned with the name “Algramo”. Customers bring reusable containers – each fitted with a unique RFID tag – to refill daily essentials such as shampoo, washing-up liquid and detergent. They can also order refills to their door and pay via a phone app. Refill services like these are pivotal to addressing the plastic pollution crisis, experts say. Reducing consumption of single-use plastic products, including bottles and containers, can decrease the 430 million tonnes of plastic humanity produces a year, two-thirds of which are short-lived products that soon become waste. Crucially, the cost of Algramo products per gram ­is the same no matter how little or how much customers buy. Alleviating the “poverty tax,” which forces those with lower incomes to incur higher expenses for not buying in bulk, is the central goal of Chilean start-up Algramo – meaning “by the gram” in Spanish. With one-third of all plastics produced used just once and thrown away, solutions to the plastic pollution crisis must follow a life-cycle approach, according to a United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) Turning off the Tap report released yesterday. This entails reducing plastic pollution at all stages of a product’s life cycle and encouraging reuse. “We must eliminate unnecessary plastic,” said Elisa Tonda, Chief of the Resources and Markets Branch at UNEP. “The food and beverage industry is the main source of plastic waste in developing countries and is responsible for 9 of the 10 most common items picked up during beach clean ups.” Research shows that shifting to a circular economy by 2040 could create 700,000 additional jobs globally and improve livelihoods for millions of workers in the informal sector, largely in developing countries.