Ocean Plastic Technologies is a company based on
the principle of giving back to the community
and giving back to society.
So we are a what you would term a public benefit corporation
or a social enterprise.
We are for profit to be sustainable but we have a bigger goal.
We want to be judged on how many tons of plastic we reclaim from the environment,
to recycle back into the economy as part of a circular loop
and we've applied that to all the sectors of our business.
Our agenda was to actually monetise the trash in the community,
to give it a value
so that you're creating a new sort of waste economy.
You're talking about potentially five to 10 grandmothers or "gogo's" collecting plastic.
Each of those gogo's is leveraging off a network of another four or five people.
And then obviously we've got what we call our direct clients,
which are people bringing bags of plastic into the container,
weighing it and getting paid you know small amounts of money
- which are generally sort of in your single digits -
which they're using as a way to supplement their income.
So we designed our Micro Recycling Plants,
which is basically a 40-foot container, so it can be picked up and moved to any location.
And what they do is they actually take the plastics in, they clean it, they wash it,
they separate it and they granulate it or flake it
and they sell it back to us as a pre-qualified product.
So we know it's clean,
we know it's separated by product type
and we know it's separated by color.
They are autonomous stand alone businesses.
They're designed to basically cover their own costs and generate profit within that
business module run by those independently owned and operated entrepreneurs.
and to complement our supply chain.
Our Micro Recycling Plants create two to three direct jobs,
which are your owner operators and then generally we see potentially up to four
or five people working actually at the Micro Recycling plant on a sort of day-to-day basis.
The benefit of our Micro Recycling Plants over your larger
recycling facilities or MRF's as they're called, is one: they are portable.
So the objective behind them from the get-go was to have them being
able to be positioned at the source of a problem or at the center of a community.
Secondly, they part or fully process the materials on site
which again benefits the community financially,
but it also allows us to create a more superior weight-volume metric
that gives us a very reliable stock feed to then turn into new products
and to actually feed back into a circular economy in a reverse supply chain.
How many tons we have recovered from from post-consumer and post-commercial users
and how much of that has actually been turned into long-life products or been reverse supplied
back into the supply chain so we're not actually consuming new resources or new virgin plastics.
Our end game is to try and establish a global network of Micro Recycling Plants that have
as much impact or more impact on the circular plastic economy as the big mechanical plants do,
to empower as many communities as we can and more importantly, to actually be true to our cause
which is measuring our impact in terms of how
many tons of plastic have we taken out of the environment,
how we find suitable technologies to actually take those plastics and either reprocess them
into long life products or to turn them into a product that's usable back into the supply chain.
And that's where we want to be judged.
We want to be judged on the educational impact we have on the back of that
so that we've changed the world we live in.
If we can create that network and that legacy, we'll achieve what we want to do.