Five impact entrepreneurs who have gone through the five-month incubation period of the World Wide Fund for Nature Philippines (WWF-Philippines) Plastic Smart Cities (PSC) Bootcamp highlighted their progress and milestones during an event dubbed as Demo Day on September 17, 2021.

Audeo, AtoAni, Cloop, Nanolabs, and Salin PH participated in masterclasses, workshops, and peer learning sessions with experts on innovation and systems thinking, marketing, accounting, strategic planning, the circular economy, gender lens investing, and pilot designing, among others with the main objective of building social enterprises with sustainable impacts to stop plastic waste leakage. 

Ric Alindayu from Cloop shares, “Over the past two years, the program has enabled us to continuously develop and hone our ideas and turn them into reality. We have gone from a student project to an actual pilot site with a growing product portfolio. Along the way, we have met partners, interns and stakeholders that have been very supportive of the project since its inception.” 

Since the program started, the five social enterprises had the opportunity to be part of and learn from a growing ecosystem of impact entrepreneurs. AtoANI Biopack has developed a scale-up plan through conversations and collaboration with various stakeholders. Nanolabs was able to build its own lab, acquire necessary equipment for “nano” research and is now building its “Nanolabs’ Garage” for product prototype production. 

In their keynote speech, Climate Change Commissioner Rachel Herrera expressed the commission’s vision and goals of lessening the plastic waste leakage through engaging with and supporting initiatives from national and local stakeholders. 

“Our cities hold a very important role here in the Philippines. They are mandated to develop their local climate change action plan, their comprehensive land use and development plans. They have a unique position to lead in this transformation into plastic smart and climate resilient cities,” Comm. Herrera added.

In WWF’s recent EPR report, the annual plastic consumption in the Philippines reaches up to 2.15 million tonnes but only 9% is recycled and about 35% potentially leaks into the open environment. 

To address this, WWF-Philippines’ No Plastics in Nature initiative partners with xchange, The Incubation Network, and MakeSense to continuously come up with creative innovations for plastic solutions. WWF-Philippines envisions a continuous building of the entrepreneurial ecosystem established during this partnership. 

WWF-Philippines Executive Director Katherine Custodio shares, "This is our commitment; to keep on innovating and coming up with solutions to solve our environment's most pressing problems. We thank our partners from xchange, MakeSense, and The Incubation Network for working with us and with these five social enterprises who inspire and work with us as we change the ending for our planet and our people. Let us all continue to work and cultivate a larger ecosystem of impact entrepreneurs with the vision of eliminating plastic pollution in our country."

Manila Observatory Energy Collaboratory Director and Senior Fellow on Climate Change Dean Antonio La Viña synthesized the Demo Day by emphasizing the importance of entrepreneurial innovations as a critical piece in the overall strategy to fight the impacts of climate change and address the worsening plastics problem. 

“And that is exactly the approach we have in this project: to abandon the familiar and conventional so that we can scale up the innovations to solve our planet’s problems. I come out today more hopeful because I know, with what the social enterprises today have presented, that our younger generation of students and thinkers have the solution to our planet’s problems.” said Dean La Viña. 

The event ended in an ecosystem mixer that grouped each social enterprise with stakeholders to provide space to interact and identify potential collaborations.