Yeo’s have been busy: Reusing, redefining, reinventing and recycling. Back in July, they launched an art sculpture display by Singaporean artist Akira Takahashi made from 100% recycled materials (with the rather long-winded title “Yeo’s Cares for Singapore—Recycling with a Heart”). At the same time, they announced a new charity project promoting youth development, in association with CARE Singapore, encouraging the public to make donations. We spoke to their head of marketing to find out more.

Where did the idea for this initiative come from?
Well, Yeo’s is a truly Singaporean brand. And, since 1984, we’ve been a supporter of National Day celebrations. Every National Day a lot of waste is generated: We sponsor close to 800,000 packs; so you can imagine the amount of waste. People just consume and then they throw away. So the NEA has been propagating that people do recycling. We thought it was a good initiative to tie in with. We’re a traditional brand, but we want to show that we can retain our heritage and also move with the times.

Coincidentally it’s also Yeo’s 111th anniversary; so we tried to fit everything together: To celebrate National Day (Aug 9) and Yeo’s birthday, to promote recycling and we also wanted to throw in a charitable element, to raise funds for needy people.

Do Singaporeans really care about recycling?
I think the Singaporean government still needs to pump in a good deal of effort to promote recycling. Compared to the rest of the world, we’re still not there yet. We’ve progressed; at least people do now recycle. But when Singaporeans do recycling they want something to motivate them! So I think we need everybody to come together to start propagating and promoting this effort.

The educational part hasn’t sunk in to peoples’ minds. Look at the amount of plastic bags in supermarkets! When we do exhibitions, for example, we wanted to do away with plastic bags. But we got a lot of verbal abuse from consumers! So we had no choice; we had to keep printing plastic bags.

What other charitable work has Yeo’s been involved with?
Last year we worked with Halfway House, as well as Singapore Prisons, to create handicrafts using packaging material.

Each year, we collect whatever waste the NDP participants create. We have to manually sort it out; including myself as a volunteer, digging out all the rubbish. Even the cleaners don’t want to do it! It sits there until the parade is over, and it smells horrible.

Last year, we then sent the waste to the Halfway House, to clean and sun it. Then we brought it to the prisons for the prisoners to work on. We actually engaged trainers from Malaysia to teach the prisoners skills in creating handicrafts. All proceeds went to the Yellow Ribbon Project.