Sitting in a sultry corner of southern India, beside the rain trees and beaches of Mangalore, Shifrah Jacobs, the co-founder of Plastics for Change, smiles as she recalls how it all began. One thing she says she won’t ever forget is the Body Shop for its big-heartedness when her company was a wet-behind-the-ears startup.
The Body Shop, whose main UK business collapsed into administration in February, has closed more than 80 stores in its home market and is seeking a rescue deal with landlords, while outlets in the US, Canada and parts of Europe have also shut down.
While some of the small global suppliers to the high street retailer have expressed fears about being left with a glut of stock and an uncertain future, Plastics for Change is feeling optimistic.
The Body Shop founder, Anita Roddick, who died in 2007, was passionate about backing small-scale suppliers in remote areas to supply key ingredients in her products. The group worked with 18 community fair trade suppliers around the world, providing Brazil nut oil from Peru, sesame oil from Nicaragua and handmade recycled paper packaging from Nepal.
Jacobs and co-founder Andrew Almack set up Plastics for Change in 2015 with the idea of creating the first fair trade verified recycled plastic platform. It would connect waste pickers with scrap merchants and turn discarded plastic into high-quality recycled packaging. In doing so, it would help protect the environment and provide some of the estimated 2 million waste pickers who clean India’s city streets with a regular income and dignity.
Almack said that when he launched the company he was determined to get The Body Shop as a partner because no other company in the world had as much experience with fair trade supply chains. “I flew to a conference in Singapore specifically to meet with the sourcing director. I chased him down the hall as he was leaving the conference and pitched the concept of fair trade plastic.
“It took several years of working with The Body Shop and seven trips to their head office to achieve the community fair trade programme requirements and launch this initiative,” he says.
The Body Shop helped him not just with support but in sharing lessons from smallholder farmers that Almack could apply when connecting waste pickers with global brands. Since the launch of the partnership in 2019: “We’ve expanded our programmes in seven geographies and continue to use the philosophy of ‘Trade, Not Aid’ to help create a social impact through recycling,” says Almack.
Plastics for Change, based in Bengaluru (formerly Bangalore), in the southern state of Karnataka, and with operations across south India, has created a responsible supply chain to provide stable and fair incomes for waste pickers and meet global brands’ many packaging needs.