Sustainability

Natural choice

Jorge Suzuki was one of the first Braskem clients to buy green polyethylene

written by: Luciana Moglia
photo by: Mathias Cramer

Sustainability and innovation are a constant presence in the life and career of business leader and entrepreneur Jorge Suzuki. The owner of Acinplas, a national leader in the manufacture of plastic containers for fruit and vegetables used in retail stores, he was one of the first Braskem clients to sign a contract for the purchase of green polyethylene, a plastic resin made from sugarcane ethanol, a renewable raw material.

Acinplas’s subsidiries include Suzuki, Koba, Voti, Plasa and Tashiro&Takata, which are respectively located in Estância Velha, Ivoti, Dois Irmãos and Sapiranga (rural towns in the state of Rio Grande do Sul) and Uruguay. Their units process 12,000 tonnes per year of polyethylene, representing nearly 50% of the market for that product in Brazil.

Waste raw materials from Acinplas’s units and neighboring businesses are used to make plastic lumber. The company has developed an extruder that can recycle wet, dirty plastic at a relatively low cost. This is a not-for-profit activity. The product is donated for the manufacture of items such as garbage cans, flower pots and park benches. “We want to make our process even cheaper to help find solutions for the eco-friendly disposal of plastics and create sources of income for the needy, who can turn that activity into a business,” says Jorge Suzuki.

Married with two daughters, Suzuki is of Japanese descent. He was born in Uruguay in 1949, the country adopted by his grandparents, who arrived there from Japan nearly 100 years ago to grow and sell flowers. When he was 19, he and a cousin decided to grow carnations in the nearby Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, where those flowers had never been produced before. They teamed up to buy the property in Estância Velha where the company’s first factory now stands.

A childhood friend convinced Suzuki to go into plastics. “It was a new activity back then. Flower sales financed the initial purchase of raw materials used to make fruit and vegetable packaging. We started out with a manual production technology.”

Now 60, Suzuki has worked in the plastics manufacturing business for 35 years, and sums up his greatest virtue in the business world in one word: persistence. This has been his main strength, enabling him to carry out a project that could help solve at least part of the problem of plastic disposal. The entrepreneur is convinced that the worldwide efforts aimed at preserving the environment will ensure a quality future for the next generations. “Society is concerned about this issue. We will achieve sustainability.”