S21 - Session P2 - From bags for bunches to corner boards for pallets: recycling banana plastic in Peru

Authors: Luud Clercx *, Diego Balarezo, Martin Orlando Carreño Zapata, Rik Voerman

In banana cultivation for export, plastic bags are hung around the young bunch. This way, a microclimate is created inside the bag, which makes the bananas in the bunch grow better. The bag also protects the bunch from birds and insects that do not affect the eating quality of the fruit, but feed, scrape or oviposit on the peel, leaving behind small superficial scratches, spots or scars. However, the supermarkets pursue what is called 'cosmetic quality', with the iconic perfect yellow banana as example, and handle 'zero tolerance' for these defects. But this beauty comes with a price: the massive use of plastic bunch bags; and, in the conventional, non-organic banana production, the use of bunch bags impregnated with insecticides. Not many consumers know this. In Peru's small export banana sector alone, some 20 million bunch bags are used annually, totalling 450 tons of plastic. The bag can only be used once, after which it becomes waste. Recycling of these plastics is practiced in some countries (such as in Costa Rica), but in most cases and in Peru, these bunch bags are thrown away (ending in landfills), buried, burned or just left behind in plantations or along roads, with a high risk of cumulative pollution of land-based ecosystems with (micro) plastics. Together with banana producer organizations and the Banana Cluster in Peru, and with co-finance from the Netherlands Agency for Entrepreneurial Development RVO, the CACTUS supermarket in Luxemburg and the INNOVATE program in Peru, AgroFair founded the company 'Grupo ECOBAN S.R.L.', that started to recycle banana plastic to manufacture corner boards for pallets, early 2022. We will explore the challenges of collecting and processing used banana bunch bags, the business model of the factory and the perspectives to extend its operations, to make organic banana production for export more sustainable.