Yangon-based investment advisory firm, Andaman Capital Partners, has invested into a local plastics recycling start-up. Andaman Capital has injected a mid-six digit figure in Myanmar Recycles, which will help the start up to expand its business.

The actual sum was not disclosed.

“The funding will be used to acquire more recycling equipment that will significantly lift our business’ recycling volumes and have a greater impact on the growing waste problem in Myanmar,” said Mimi Wu, co-founder of Myanmar Recycles.

 

Founded in 2017, Myanmar Recycles processes plastic film which are deemed too contaminated or complex to recycle by other firms. The firm aims to achieve a zero waste future by collecting and recycling contaminated post-consumer plastic film waste.

“Core economic growth and rising consumer spending [in Myanmar], likely to be among the fastest in Asia, will generate huge demand for plastics throughout the consumer, industrial and agricultural sectors – and a lot of plastic waste. Myanmar Recycles’ business and sustainability goals and the team’s execution to date convinced us this is an attractive investment opportunity,” Kevin Murphy, managing director of Andaman Capital Partners, told Myanmar Times.

 

“As a fast-growing economy, Myanmar will inevitably use and produce more plastic film for consumer, agricultural and industrial consumption – we hope to capitalise on making more of it from recycled materials,” he said in a release.

Plastic pollution is a problem in Myanmar and a 2019 study by Fauna & Flora International and Thant Myanmar, a non-profit organisation combating plastic pollution in Myanmar, revealed that 119 tonnes of plastic waste enter the river daily, based on water samples taken by experts along the Ayeyarwady from Mandalay to Pyay in Bago Region.

Myanmar’s Ayeyarwaddy River has been ranked the ninth most polluted river in the world, as predicted by the global river plastic inputs model, making it more polluted than the Mekong River (ranked 11th).

The 2018 Htein Bin landfill fire also left a stench of burning plastic for days in Yangon.

Myanmar Recycles aims to become a leading recycling firm in Myanmar which will collect and recycle post-consumer plastic film in an industrial scale and in a environmentally-friendly way. The model has seen it establish a strategic partnership with the Yangon City Development Council to reduce disposal of reusable plastic film and bags at the Htein Bin landfill.