Naturally inclined to turn towards the United States, Quebec companies sometimes look much further afield, including as far as Vietnam. Third article in a series of five.
A specialist in the circular economy, the Quebec company Lavergne notes that even the simplest sustainable development tools have difficulty keeping up with the pace of economic development in Vietnam.
The Montreal company has developed a physical process that makes it possible to give recycled plastic the same properties and at the same price as the best quality virgin resin, but with a carbon footprint 80% to 90% lower. As the largest users of plastic are manufacturers in Asia and the latter are increasingly seeking to shorten their supply chains and their delivery times, the company naturally wanted to set up alongside them and took up residence in Vietnam. But this country, like other developing economies in the region, does not have a plastic recovery system.
“We arrived in Vietnam a bit by chance, 13 years ago, and we are very happy about it,” says Jean-Luc Lavergne, the founder and CEO of the company which also has factories in Quebec, in Belgium and Haiti. “We still don’t have any customers in the country, but our goal is to serve Asia. China is only four days away by boat, Thailand and Malaysia are just as close…”
Feet in the sand
Lavergne’s Vietnamese factory is in Da Nang, on the shores of the South China Sea, in the middle of this banana-shaped country. The seaside city’s long sandy beaches attract millions of vacationing Vietnamese and foreign tourists each year, particularly from South Korea and China. The modest hostels for penniless backpackers that lined a small beach road 15 or 20 years ago have been replaced by gleaming hotel complexes and trendy bars. The COVID pandemic and the current downturn in the Chinese economy, however, have hit hard, leaving pretentious hotels and a glitzy casino half-finished.
In an industrial district less than ten minutes from the beach, the Lavergne factory is, all in all, relatively modest. Immediately after the barrier, you come across a pretty little white two-story building surrounded by shrubs and flowers where the offices are located. The factory itself is located just behind it. Controlled by a handful of employees, it consists of a long building with corrugated iron walls and roof which houses the production machines, a small laboratory for quality controls and huge bags in cardboard boxes which contain, at one end, recycled plastic which has been delivered in flake form and, at the other end, very small balls of plastic sorted by colors ready to be shipped.
Lavergne’s raw material comes from selective collection systems and is intended, once transformed, to be used by the electronics, automobile, household appliances and even office equipment industries. For some of its clients, such as the American computer equipment manufacturer Hewlett-Packard, Lavergne provides a closed-loop logistics chain which allows, for example, the recovery of its old ink cartridges to recycle the plastic and turn it into material. first to manufacture new cartridges. “It has been calculated that cartridges are already in their tenth complete life cycle. This is the long-term trend we see in the industry. We are therefore far, here, from simply talking about recovering plastic to make park benches,” explains Jean-Luc Lavergne.
Recycling and green barriers
The problem, he says, is that apart from the most developed economies, such as Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, the countries of East and Southeast Asia do not have recyclable material collection system. “Recovery is generally left to small private actors, in informal systems, and where we often simply recover the most valuable materials and burn the rest. You will understand that we cannot rely on this for our supply. »
Discussions between the Quebec company and local authorities have been initiated to help the latter put in place initial mechanisms for collecting recyclable materials. ” But we are not there yet. »
In the meantime, Lavergne brings its recycled plastic flakes from its factories in Canada, the United States, but especially from Haiti. “It’s not ideal, but we have no choice at the moment. »
In addition to defeating the goal of shortening supply chains, this solution turns out to be more complicated than it seems. Indeed, after having served for years as trash cans for rich economies who shipped their waste there claiming that it would be properly recycled, the countries of the region have erected “green barriers” aimed at prohibiting this twisted form of imports. . But it can be long and arduous to convince local authorities that the delicate flakes of recycled plastic imported from Canada or Haiti are not simple waste.
It is, among other things, obtaining this type of import permit that is delaying Lavergne’s project to find a place in Vietnam where the company could multiply by five the space it has available for its production. She is also looking at what she could do elsewhere in the region.
However, his boss remains hopeful that he will soon have local sources of recycled plastic. “There is increasing pressure on businesses and governments to deal with end-of-life products. And when countries, like China, for example, finally decide to move, I expect that it will then go quite a bit faster than was the case, at the time, with us, in South America. North. »
This report was financed thanks to the support of the Transat-International Journalism Fund.The duty.