HD Hyundai Oilbank employees expand ESG campaigns

HD Hyundai Oilbank employees put discarded plastic bottle caps in a box as part of the company's upcycling campaign at the headquarters in Seoul, Friday. / Courtesy of HD Hyundai Oilbank

By Kim Jae-heun

HD Hyundai Oilbank recently carried out a plastic upcycling campaign with its executives and staff members as part of the company's environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) activities, the refiner said Monday.

The name of the campaign, “Ddu Kkeong Moa Moa” means collecting plastic bottle caps in Korean. The aim is to collect discarded plastic bottle caps and donate them to upcycling companies to make new products.

Employees who donated more than a certain number of caps were given gifts, such as toothpaste squeezers made through recycling. Some were given the opportunity to participate in upcycling activities.

“It was a valuable experience to give new life to a resource that was abandoned,” said a HD Hyundai Oilbank employee who participated in the campaign.

The refiner also ran the “ESG 7” challenge for the month of April. Executives and staff members selected seven ESG activities they can practice in their daily lives and carried them out. The activities included using mugs or tumblers, running meetings without papers, using stairs and saving electricity in the office.

In addition, HD Hyundai Oilbank is practicing resource circulation by using pyrolysis oil produced through the chemical recycling of waste plastic at its oil refineries.

In January of 2022, HD Hyundai Oilbank became the first Korean refiner to win ISCC PLUS, an international eco-friendly production certification, for its waste plastic pyrolysis oil-based products. It is currently selling the products to both domestic and overseas petrochemical firms.

Hyundai plans to expand the production of eco-friendly products by gradually increasing the amount of pyrolysis oil used at its refineries.