As part of their climate commitments, businesses have adopted sustainable practices to improve resource efficiency.
In Singapore, MNCs like SK tes, Diageo, and Sanofi have found partners among Singapore’s innovative local enterprises, to help them co-develop and deploy sustainable solutions.
THE PARTNERSHIP
Typically, electronic waste, or e-waste, is collected and sorted by hand into categories. The devices are then examined and parts that can be reused are extracted. What remains is safely destroyed. For many companies, this process can be tedious and complicated.
SK tes, a global leader in sustainable technology solutions headquartered in Singapore, needed to address the environmental impact of e-waste and the inefficiencies of the recycling process. The company turned to automation to improve productivity, ensure accurate and optimised recovery of valuable materials and components, and enhance worker safety.
In 2025, SK tes initiated a partnership with Aubotic Technology, a Singaporean automation and robotic engineering solutions provider, to research and build next-generation robotic technologies to enhance quality consistency and reduce reliance on manual labour in the recycling process. This included automating the initial stage of portable battery recycling by automatically detecting batteries that were still in packaging.
The Partnerships for Capability transformation (PACT) scheme is a funding initiative by the Economic Development Board and Enterprise Singapore for global companies looking to collaborate with Singapore enterprises. The scheme now covers more types of partnerships across industry segments.
PACT can help MNCs localise solutions, enhance supply chain resilience and pursue innovation for growth in Asia. More than 2,500 Singapore-based firms have benefited from PACT since its launch in 2010.
How it works
Partnership costs
PACT defrays part of costs incurred by global companies and their local suppliers or partners for activities arising from approved partnership modalities. This includes the following costs:
The Partnership
When Diageo, a leading alcoholic beverages company, found that roughly 90 per cent of their total carbon usage came from Scope 3 emissions, of which roughly one third is packaging, they sought to trial different solutions.
Scope 3 emissions are all the indirect greenhouse gas emissions tied to a company's operations, which occur outside of its immediate control, across its entire value chain. They cover everything from the manufacturing of purchased materials and business travel to the use and disposal of the company's products by its customers.
In 2021, Diageo started to trial a partnership with ecoSPIRITS, a Singapore-based technology company, to distribute Diageo’s products in ecoSPIRITS’ reusable glass packaging. Diageo embarked on a pilot with them in Southeast Asia in 2022, and in 2023 signed a Global Licensing Agreement to further roll-out the solution to more markets.
The project began through Diageo’s Sustainable Solutions programme—an open innovation programme where Diageo invested in new technologies and partnerships with startups.
ecoSPIRITS provides an innovative low carbon, low waste spirits distribution technology through a patented closed-loop circular economy system, including a reusable packaging format known as the ecoTOTE. It helps to implement a circular economy in companies’ supply chains by reducing the amount of glass bottles.
Spirits are transported in bulk, processed into ecoTOTEs for venue delivery, and once empty they are collected, sanitised, refilled and reused. ecoSPIRITS now has more than 100,000 ecoTOTEs in circulation worldwide. Under the partnership, Diageo’s Smirnoff Vodka, Gordon’s Gin and Captain Morgan Rum will be made available in ecoTOTE format in participating markets.
As part of Diageo’s Spirit of Progress ESG plan, the company has committed to increasing the percentage of recycled content in packaging to 50 per cent by 2030. Diageo has also hit its 2025 goal of 35 per cent recycled content in PET bottles.1
THE PARTNERSHIP
Sanofi's new S$800 million state-of-the-art manufacturing facility, Modulus, in Singapore serves as a blueprint for sustainable biopharmaceutical production. This modular concept facility not only represents a significant investment into Singapore’s vibrant biopharma industry but also embodies a strategic commitment to environmental sustainability. By integrating eco-friendly features into its core design and construction, Sanofi is pioneering new standards for a more sustainable future in the biopharmaceutical industry.
The next-generation facility has been designed with the lowest possible carbon footprint with optimised waste management and renewable energy, demonstrating how large-scale industrial projects can successfully embed green initiatives from the outset.
A notable feature of the 58,000 square metre Modulus facility is the innovative use of recycled plastics including discarded insulin pens for paving its roads. That amounts to about 1.5km worth of roads — about the length of 15 soccer fields.
This was made possible through a strategic partnership with local deep-tech enterprise, Magorium, showcasing how MNCs can partner with innovative enterprises in Singapore to achieve specific sustainability goals.
Magorium's proprietary technology transforms unsorted plastic waste into NEWBitumen, a sustainable substitute for crude-derived bitumen.
The two companies also partnered with the National University Hospital in Singapore to collect medical waste such as Sanofi’s insulin pens recycling initiative. By transforming discarded medical waste into a valuable resource, the partnership proves that there is a viable and scalable solution for corporate waste management.
Approximately 800,000 Sanofi insulin pens are used annually, generating about 16.8 tonnes of plastic waste. Through the insulin pens recycling project, Sanofi has set an ambitious target to collect and recycle more than 70 per cent of their distributed pens.
Incidentally, collecting these used pens came with its own set of challenges such as a reliance on voluntary participation by consumers and the inability to properly predict volume of recoverable waste. The team subsequently learned that engaging customers at multiple touchpoints and working closely with pharmacists to monitor volume helped them overcome the respective challenges.
The technology has already been utilised elsewhere in Singapore, and Magorium is now exploring new pilot projects in the ASEAN region.
1 "An Update on Diageo's Sustainability Goals to Build Climate Resilience." Diageo, 14 Aug. 2025,
https://www.diageo.com/en/news-and-media/stories/2025/an-update-on-diageo-sustainability-goals-to-build-climate-resilience.
