Poverty comes in small packages

You do not need an economics degree to understand the sachet economy. Just stand outside a sari-sari store around six in the evening.

Someone buys one sachet of shampoo. Another asks for a small packet of detergent, three-in-one coffee, and cooking oil poured into plastic. A student loads PHP 20 because there is something to submit online tonight. Somebody buys two cigarettes instead of a pack. Another asks, “Tagpila ang isa?” before deciding whether to get two.

Nobody there calls it the sachet economy. Nobody says they are participating in a culture of scarcity. They are simply buying what they can afford today.

That last word matters: today.

We Filipinos have long had tingi. There is something wonderfully practical about it. You do not need a whole bottle of soy sauce if you need only enough for tonight’s adobo. You do not buy a kilo of onions when PHP 20 will do. The sari-sari store understands this better than most economists do. It sells according to the size of the customer’s pocket, not according to the size manufacturers prefer.

But there is another side to this practicality. More than 17 million Filipinos were living below the poverty line in 2023, according to Philippine Statistics Authority figures cited by Resurreccion (2024). For many households, buying small is not really a lifestyle choice. It is what the budget allows.

There is an unfairness built into tingi: the less money you have, the more you may pay in the long run. A PHP 300 bottle may be the better deal, but not when only PHP 50 is left in your pocket.

“The 7 Habits” author Stephen Covey’s idea of scarcity is useful (1989), but only up to a point. For many families, scarcity is not a way of thinking. It is simply everyday life. You cannot positive-think your way into an extra PHP 1,000 before payday.

What scarcity can do, especially when it becomes a way of life, is shorten the distance we can afford to look ahead. Dinner comes before next month’s grocery savings. Jeepney fare comes before buying in bulk. Tonight’s shampoo comes before thinking about where its wrapper will be 20 years from now. This is not necessarily irresponsibility. When the present keeps sending bills, the future has trouble getting into the conversation.

Unfortunately, plastic has a much longer memory than the household budget.

Filipinos discard an estimated 164 million sachets every day, close to 60 billion pieces in a year. Many are multilayer packets made from combinations of plastic, aluminum, and adhesives that are particularly difficult to recover. GAIA once illustrated the scale rather memorably: a year’s worth of discarded sachets would be enough to cover Metro Manila about a foot deep.

A regional brand audit conducted from October 2023 to February 2024 collected 33,647 sachets across four Asian countries. Of these, 10,801 came from Philippine sites. The audit found that most had contained packaged food, with the rest coming from household and personal care products. This is usually the point where everybody starts looking for someone to blame.

The consumer is an easy target. Why keep buying sachets? Why not bring containers? Why not segregate properly? Fair questions, but incomplete ones.

The customer did not decide to manufacture a shampoo packet from several materials that are difficult to separate. The sari-sari store owner did not design the national waste system. Consumers cannot build recycling plants. Barangays cannot redesign corporate packaging. Companies, on the other hand, cannot follow every wrapper home and place it in the proper bin.

There is responsibility all around, but it is not the same responsibility.

The data make that distinction important. The Philippines is not actually among the world’s biggest plastic consumers per person. Estimates cited by Baclig (2026) put annual Philippine plastic waste generation at roughly 13 kilograms per person, below the global average cited in the same report. Our uglier number comes afterward: about 55.56% of Philippine plastic waste was projected to be mismanaged in 2025.

That changes the conversation. The problem is not simply that Filipinos use plastic with reckless abandon. Much of what we discard enters a system that cannot reliably collect, sort, process, or contain it.

The Extended Producer Responsibility Act of 2022, Republic Act No. 11898, at least recognizes that the companies putting plastic packaging into the market have responsibilities after the sale. That is an important shift. But even recovery targets need some scrutiny. Picking up more plastic does not automatically mean we have found the environmentally best way of dealing with it.

A Philippine study makes that point rather sharply. Lacang et al. (2025) looked at three options: refill systems, improved waste collection, and recycling sachets into pellets. They estimated that annual sachet waste could reach 145,000 tons by 2028 if things continue as they are.

The finding worth remembering? Of the three, only refill systems performed better environmentally than business as usual.

That should make us think twice about what we call a solution. A truck full of recovered plastic makes a good photograph. But the truck uses fuel. Collection uses resources. Processing consumes energy. Recycling has its own environmental footprint. Sometimes the smartest piece of waste to manage is the one we never create.

Refill systems are therefore worth another look. San Juan and Quezon City have experimented with refill arrangements in selected sari-sari stores. The idea sounds almost embarrassingly old-fashioned. Bring a container. Buy only what you need. Refill it later.

Our grandparents might reasonably ask why it took us several decades and several environmental conferences to rediscover that.

Still, refill will work only if it respects the same economics that made sachets successful. It has to be cheap. It has to be nearby. It has to be convenient. And people should still be able to buy tingi. If an environmentally friendly refill requires a tricycle ride, an app, a membership card, and a lecture on sustainability, the PHP 3 sachet hanging in Aling Nena’s store will win before breakfast.

Schools can help here, although perhaps we have enough “Save Mother Earth” posters already. Then comes the harder question: Who pays for cheap convenience after the product is gone? That question is more useful than scolding a child for buying juice in a sachet.

There is also a danger in romanticizing all this as Filipino resilience. We love that word. We use it after typhoons, floods, inflation, power interruptions, and practically every national inconvenience that somebody should probably have prevented.

Yes, tingi shows resourcefulness. There is skill in stretching a small salary across rice, electricity, school expenses, medicine, fare, and tonight’s ulam. But resilience should describe how people survive difficulty. It should not become our excuse for keeping the difficulty permanent.

A mother who can make PHP 500 cover needs that seem to require PHP 700 deserves admiration. She also deserves an economy in which she does not have to perform that miracle every week.

Perhaps that is why the humble sachet says so much about us. It may hold only a little shampoo, coffee, or soy sauce, but behind it are much bigger questions about income, business, consumption, waste, policy, and the environment.

The Filipino did not fall in love with tiny packages because we dream small. Often, we buy small because that is what today’s money can reach.

And maybe that is the real problem hiding inside the sachet. We have become very good at making a little last until tomorrow. The plastic lasts much longer.

Poverty should not have to come packaged.

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Doc H fondly describes himself as a “student of and for life” who, like many others, aspires to a life-giving and why-driven world grounded in social justice and the pursuit of happiness. His views do not necessarily reflect those of the institutions he is employed or connected with.