For decades, the sachet was the cheapest way for low-income households to buy everyday goods in the Philippines. But if measured per milliliter, it’s one of the most expensive. In Davao City, a women-led refill network backed by a European Union–funded accelerator is betting that once shoppers do the math, the plastic goes away on its own.
A one-liter bottle of dishwashing liquid, refilled again and again, replaces up to 58 sachets. The same bottle holding detergent replaces 52, and holding shampoo as many as 153.
Greentayo’s founders Patricia Melizza Patmei Ruivivar and Raissa Ling built their business on those numbers. A 60-milliliter refill of dishwashing liquid at a Greentayo station costs about 7.20 pesos. That’s less than a short tricycle ride and about half what the same amount of a leading brand costs in sachets.
It’s not cheap. It’s affordable, the founders say. For them the difference matters. Cheap means cutting corners. Affordable means cutting out the costs that never benefited the customer: the packaging, the trucking between Mindanao and Manila, and the celebrity endorsers. Greentayo founders have a name for those costs- the poverty premium.
The Poverty Premium
The founders tell the sachet’s history as a story of tingi buying that got hijacked.
Filipinos used to buy small things without throwing anything away. Children were sent to the sari-sari store with empty bottles to buy five or ten pesos’ worth of toyo, suka or cooking oil. Soft drink bottles went back to the store to be refilled. Then multinational manufacturers of home and personal care products saw that daily wage earners couldn’t afford to buy in bulk, and they built a format around that- the sachet.
They took advantage of our poverty, Ling says. They give the illusion that it’s convenient and affordable. But if you compute it, it’s more expensive in the long run.
Greentayo calls low-income families constrained consumers, not irrational ones. A sachet fits a household’s daily cash flow. What has been missing is an alternative that is just as accessible, sold at the neighborhood level through institutions people already trust.
The plastic adds up. Filipinos use an estimated 163.7 million sachets every day, nearly 59.7 billion a year, according to a 2019 study by the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA) cited by the Climate Change Commission. Most are multilayer laminates that can’t be recycled economically, so they end up in dumpsites, waterways and the sea. The World Bank’s Market Study for the Philippines: Plastics Circularity Opportunities and Barriers describes the bind: plastic packaging gives poor and middle-income households low-cost goods, and the reliance on sachets and pouches drives marine plastic pollution.
Greentayo argues the money drains away too. Its proposal estimates that 340 billion leaves local economies every year through mass-produced goods made elsewhere.
Cheaper by the Liter
Greentayo’s products cost 35 to 50 percent less than leading commercial brands. The savings come from three things: getting rid of the packaging premium, shortening the supply chain, and keeping profits in the community instead of sending them to distant shareholders.
Shortening the supply chain is the key move. Greentayo points out that some multinationals already have their products toll-manufactured by local companies. The product is made in the region, shipped to Manila to be sachet-packed, and shipped back to Davao to sell. Greentayo skips that loop and passes the savings to customers. It doesn’t pay for celebrity endorsements either. Its endorsers are the community leaders who run its refill points.
The products are all-natural, plant-based and locally sourced: dishwashing liquid, laundry detergent, fabric conditioner, body wash, shampoo with conditioner, hand and bar soap, bleach, alcohol, a disinfectant, an air freshener, and essential oils sold as haplas. Coconut cooking oil, soy sauce, vinegar and Davao coffee are next, through partnerships with cooperatives and organic farmers’ associations.
Containers are part of the economics too. Customers can reuse any bottle they already have. Larger buyers take part in a gallon swap, manufacturers take back the gallons and reuse them, and each returned gallon earns a ₱5 credit.
The Math for the Woman Behind the Counter
Greentayo sells its network the way a franchisor would, as a ladder of buy-ins. At the top is the Barangay Refill Eco Center. For ₱50,000, it becomes the community distributor for at least 20 Green Corners. A Greentayo Refill Station, which puts dispensers in high-traffic areas, costs ₱25,000. Businesses and institutions can sign one-year Green Deal supply agreements, and homes and offices can subscribe to monthly or quarterly deliveries for a year.
For households, the rung that matters is the cheapest one. For ₱3,500, a sari-sari store owner or home-based entrepreneur gets a Green Corner. It comes with a refill kit of eight gallons of core products across four product lines, plus advocacy materials. Ruivivar likes to compare the cost to treating friends to a buffet. The operator then sells tingi by the milliliter, into whatever containers customers bring.
Greentayo’s model assumes the operator sells half the kit to neighbors at a 20-percent markup and uses the rest at home. On that basis, each inventory cycle brings in about ₱300 in profit and saves the household about ₱800 compared with buying commercial brands. Together that comes to about ₱1,100 per cycle, or a return of roughly 32 percent on the initial outlay.
The amounts are small, and that’s the point. A Green Corner pays off at home first, by cutting the operator’s own spending, and sales to neighbors add income on top. It needs no new storefront and puts little capital at risk, so a daily wage earner can actually start one.
Women at Both Ends of the Sale
Greentayo is a project of Mothers for Peace Social Enterprise, Inc., part of the Mindanao women’s organization founded and chaired by peace advocate Irene M. Santiago. For Santiago, the refill business continues the organization’s long-held belief that peace rests on secure livelihoods and a healthy environment. In her statement supporting the Circulab application, she described Greentayo as a model built to break a sachet economy that drains both the pockets of our mothers and the health of our oceans.
The project’s research found that women in low-income neighborhoods manage household health and finances, and that they bear most of the sachet economy’s hidden cost premium. Ling calls mothers the anchors of the household. They make the decisions, run the budget and look after the family’s health.
The founders say the argument that moves women in the barangays is economic, not environmental. Plastic waste draws concern, but what wins people over is learning how many billions of pesos leave their communities for multinational corporations. Ruivivar says women’s next question comes quickly, they already run the neighborhood sari-sari stores, so why shouldn’t they run this business themselves?
That idea is built into the governance. Barangay Councils for Women manage the barangay-level refill centers and choose which Green Corner operators to bring in. All operators come from groups historically shut out of economic decision-making: women, seniors, youth, out-of-school youth and Indigenous Peoples. Greentayo tracks results by gender, including how much household savings stay with female heads of household.
A Refill Network Built Like a Distribution Business
Greentayo is set up less like an eco-store and more like a consumer goods distributor:
- The hub in 121 University Avenue, Juna Subdivision, Davao City, supplies the network.
- Barangay Refill and Eco Centers, run by Barangay Councils for Women, distribute products at a 40 percent margin.
- Each Eco Center supports Green Corners in nearby sari-sari stores, a hub-and-spoke design that lets the network grow without adding much overhead.
- GreenDeals supply local businesses and institutions in bulk, at lower prices.
- Households refill down the street.
Each center and Green Corner works under a one-year renewable contract, and renewal depends on meeting sachet-diversion and wealth-retention targets. Greentayo says each Eco Center has historically paid back its investment within about five months.
Location matters as much as price. Sachets are sold everywhere, so the founders want refills to be just as easy to find, starting a few steps from people’s homes. They don’t want to ban the sachet. They want the refill next to it on the shelf.
“We’re not fighting the multinational corporations head on,” Ruivivar says. “We’re building an alternative. The most effective way of changing a behavior is to change the environment.”
The Founders
The two founders split the work along the lines of their careers.
Raissa Cinco Ling, MBA, is Greentayo’s cofounder and Operations Manager. Her career spans about 20 years from hospitality and integrated-resort operations, including five years at Marina Bay Sands in Singapore and later at Okada Manila, to running a family mountain resort and a multispecialty clinic in Davao. She has a BS in Biology and an MBA, with distinction, from the Asian Institute of Management, with concentrations in marketing and sustainability. She has chaired the BS Entrepreneurship program at Davao Doctors College and worked with the technology transfer and business development at the University of the Philippines Mindanao.
Patricia Melizza Bello Ruivivar, co-founder and advocacy officer, brings more than 30 years in communications and public affairs. She is described as the longest-serving chief of staff to the Davao City mayor. Her other roles include communications director at the Office of the Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process and deputy project manager of the Mindanao Railway Project. Much of her work has focused on women: she has worked with the Mindanao Commission on Women, the Kahayag Training Institute on Gender and Governance, and, since 2014, the #WomenSeriously global campaign on women, peace and security. She also holds leadership roles in the Kahayag Foundation and a major credit cooperative, and has written a column for the Mindanao Times since 2004.
It Takes a Village
Greentayo’s partner list reads like a map of Davao’s civic institutions:
- Department of Health Region XI, Greentayo’s first government partner, hosts Green Mondays at the Southern Philippines Medical Center on the first Monday of each month. Staff and visitors bring containers to refill.
- The Rotary Club of Downtown Davao is backing a Barangay Refill Center in Centro Agdao, run out of the club’s Center for Hope, a launchpad for women-led social enterprises. Rotary also helps barangay women leaders who can’t afford the starting capital.
- Interfacing Development Interventions for Sustainability (IDIS) will independently audit Greentayo’s sachet-diversion claims and help set the criteria for choosing supply partners.
- The Davao City government is a partner in making refill systems part of local policy. The founders are working with the City Council on incentives for businesses that adopt refill and circular systems, and they have asked Upgrade Innolab to help draft the measure.
- Schools, teachers’ cooperatives and hotels are being approached as future refill sites.
The Circulab Accelerator
Greentayo is in the pioneering cohort of Circulab, the circular economy accelerator run by Upgrade Innolab Inc. with funding from the European Union under its Global Gateway strategy. Greentayo received an ₱800,000 grant to fund a nine-month rollout, turning its pilot into a permanent network of barangay refill centers and Green Corners across Davao City.
The grant pays for what a grassroots project usually can’t afford: refill hardware for the Eco Centers, starter kits for new Green Corner operators, monthly community orientations and training, and a marketing strategy. Those monthly orientations are the main way Greentayo encourages households, and its adoption targets depend on them.
For the founders, being selected also confirmed the idea itself. It told them, and their partners, that a grassroots initiative led by women can be a viable business that changes things.
They want what they learn to spread beyond Davao. Monthly data on operator income, wealth retained and sachets diverted will feed a replication blueprint for other local governments. The Greentayo Builders Toolkit, the founders’ manual for launching new sites, is published through Upgrade Innolab.
Can the Math Win?
The founders give themselves three years. They want to reach about 15 percent of Davao City households, which they believe is enough for a refill economy that sustains itself. After that, they hope to become a regional circular economy marketplace that sells far more than soap and detergent.
They think Davao is the right place to try. The city has changed its habits before, with its anti-smoking ordinance, its firecracker ban and its anti-littering rules. Each was hard to enforce at first, and each is now normal.
The founders know the next nine months will be the real test, more than anything they’ve said. Households have to keep bringing their bottles back. The women running Green Corners have to earn enough to keep their dispensers full. And independent audits have to confirm that the sachets Greentayo says it is replacing are actually disappearing.
The founders are confident about who will make that happen.
“Never doubt the abilities of our grassroots women,” Ruivivar, “to lead the transformation of our society.”
Their case doesn’t depend on persuading shoppers to care about the ocean. It depends on something more basic: a mother at a sari-sari store counter, working out which purchase leaves her with more money at the end of the week. For decades, the sachet won that comparison. Now there’s a refill on the shelf beside it, priced by the liter, and in a growing number of Davao barangays the refill is starting to win.
