Alner

Area of Focus:

Waste-Free World

Geography:

Indonesia

Indonesia is the second biggest contributor to plastic waste, worldwide. In low-income areas, most daily essentials such as detergent, shampoo and food products are sold in single-use flexible sachets and pouches, contributing to a huge plastic waste crisis as they are difficult to collect and cannot be recycled.  

Alner (an Enviu-built venture formerly named Koinpack) offers a packaging-as-a-service model to facilitate fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) businesses transitioning from single use packaging to reusable packaging. Alner provides reusable packaging to FMCGs to be filled with their products and distributes the finished goods to retailers and through home delivery to consumers’ doorsteps. Consumers buy, finish the products and return the empty packaging to retailers or directly to Alner during the next home delivery. Alner collects the packaging, cleans and sanitises it, and ensures that the packaging meets quality requirements before it re-enters the manufacturing facility to be refilled. 

At present, there are very limited options to refill and reuse in Indonesia. TRANSFORM works with Alner on a unique combination of low-tech refills and container reuse. Refill stations are chosen in community-based and conventional trade channels such as convenience stores and waste banks, generally available in the neighbourhood. This creates a viral effect and is prepared on a system that can quickly scale. In this model, customers can refill three Unilever products on their preferred channels using their own containers or those provided by Alner at the channels. There are more than 5,000 waste banks and 100,000 warungs (convenience stores) in Greater Jakarta.