Gaining visibility and ensuring ROI on returnables and recyclables
Results
RETURNABLES EXAMPLE ARE THE BEST EXAMPLE OF ZERO-WASTE PACKAGING.
RETURNABLES CAN BE USED UP TO 15 TIMES (SOME CAN BE USED UP TO 100 TIMES).
BY THE END OF 2020, 36.4% OF AB INBEV PRODUCTS WERE IN RETURNABLE PACKAGING.
Big Picture
Bavaria Breweries is a subsidiary of Anheuser-Busch InBev (AB InBev). They’re the #1 beverage company in Colombia, with leading labels that include Club Colombia, Poker, Aguila, Pilsen, Redd’s, Costeña, and Pony Alta.
Despite COVID-19’s disruption of the beverage industry, Bavaria is steadfast in helping drive the sustainability goal that ensures that, by 2025, 100% of AB InBev products will be in returnable or recyclable packaging.
Problem
In the beverage industry, it’s a well-known fact that a returnable bottle can be used multiple times, saving the cost of a new bottle. What is less-known is that recycling collectors / waste pickers, especially women, face the same issue of being invisible and unbanked as those in the agriculture, fashion, or gemstone value chains.
Realizing there’s no true value in reaching a goal that ignores its hard-working people, Bavaria Breweries would need to:
- Optimize its supply chain
- Enable digital financial identities for its recycling collectors / waste pickers (i.e., make the supply chain traceable, transparent, and equitable).
Enter BanQu
Solution
Sowing a Better Ecuador through Traceability and Transparency
Having already piloted BanQu integration with both Zambian Breweries’ smallholder farm and recycling supply chains, Bavaria Breweries would apply the same technology to their recycling supply chain to do the following:
- Improve the traceability of recycled collections
- Improve the financial inclusion of their recycling collectors / waste pickers
BanQu’s non-crypto blockchain technology created a permanent record of transactions so recycling collectors / waste pickers could gain economic passports that would improve their credit worthiness and bankability for collection carts and other revenue-enhancing tools. Now recycling collectors / waste pickers have the ability to prove their existence in global supply chains because they’ve never been given the opportunity to own, access, or monetize their supply chain transaction data history.