Meet These 7 Power Women Who Solve The Plastic Pollution Crisis. #5 Aling Alma

Aling Alma, 47 years old, is based in San Pedro, San Simon, Pampanga. Her site is beside the Pampanga River, the second largest river on the island of Luzon in the Philippines. Its headwaters are at the Sierra Madre and runs for about 261 kilometres until it drains into Manila Bay. The basin experiences, on average, at least one flooding event a year.?

Aling Alma works together with her husband Manding in the Aling Tindera program. She segregates and records the plastic while Manding bales and weighs them. Members of her community in San Pedro collect and bring plastic waste to her to gain additional income.?

The work they do may seem small-scale, but its effects can be seen every day, most especially when flooding happens. ”I have observed a cleaner river since joining the program,” Aling Almas says. “People sell their plastic directly to the Aling Tindera program instead of throwing it into the river.”?

Inspired by the work of their parents, Aling Alma’s three children spread the word about how collecting plastic can help the community both environmentally and economically. They do their part to motivate their schoolmates and their families to sell plastic to the Aling Tinderas in their community.?

The benefits of the Aling Tindera program on San Pedro are diverse and palpable. Most apparent is the increased income and opportunities the program brings to the local community, with women just like Aling Alma leading the way. It immediately follows that San Pedro now enjoys a more organized informal sector of waste collection, and by extension, a cleaner environment. As already mentioned, this has made an enormous impact on mitigating flooding, but it also allows for the improved health of the community.

PCX ’s partner, HOPE: Business for Good , launched the Aling Tindera Waste-to-Cash program in 2020 and has set up more than 100 sites across the Philippines since then. This program empowers women to become champions of sustainability in their communities by providing collection points for post-consumer plastic waste that allow for the aggregating, storing, and efficient transportation to partner processing facilities that will ensure plastic does not wind up in nature, and instead reenters the circular economy.