Upcycling can give ordinary plastic waste another way to matter, instead of ending up in a dumpsite or a drainage canal. When applied to flexible plastics like sachets, this kind of recycling can turn one of the country’s most persistent waste problems into something people can actually use.
Restore Solutions PH has built its business around solving exactly this problem. This social enterprise collects flexible plastic waste and processes it into “Restore Boards,” durable panel boards that can be built into chairs, benches, and other furniture.
The company was founded by Eric Chao, who described Restore Boards as a potential material for disaster-resilient construction, including emergency shelters and other community structures built to hold up in a crisis.
To make sachet collection accessible to ordinary households, Restore has installed 10 Smart Eco-Collection Bins (SEB) across Metro Manila. These AI-powered bins accept clean, dry sachets and other eligible flexible plastics, which are then collected and brought to the company’s upcycling facility to be processed into Restore Boards.
Rather than treating recycling as a one-way drop-off, Restore built a rewards system around it. Every sachet deposited earns “Ecobin points,” which participants, called “Eco-Heroes,” can track through the Ecobin Portal, a website where users can also monitor their own sustainability efforts over time.
Points can be redeemed for recycled keychains, coasters, trinkets, and furniture through the company’s Re-Store platform while some recycled products are also sold directly through Restore’s Shopee store.
Restore’s collection and upcycling efforts have kept roughly 450 metric tons of flexible plastic out of landfills and the ocean so far. That scale matters in a country where sachets are also considered one of the leading contributors to the clogged drainage systems behind much of the flooding in Metro Manila and other cities.
Restore’s setup is proof that recycling can turn into a habit and even physically manifest into furniture you can sit on or regularly use at home.
If one company can turn a stack of shampoo sachets into a bench, other households and communities can find their own ways to pitch in. Simply saving clean sachets until the next SEB run can mean less waste on the streets, and more material we can turn into something useful.
