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 these 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 is people bringing bags of plastic into the container
weighing it to be paid small amounts of money which are generally sort of in the 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 -
that can be picked up and moved to any location.
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 colour.
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 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 and a reverse supply chain.
We can judge how many tons have we recovered from post-consumer and post-commercial users
and how much of that has actually been turned into long-life products or
being 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 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 change the world we live in.
If we can create that network and that legacy
we will achieve what we want to do.