Asis makes a living collecting plastic for the
Plastic Bank, an organization working to
incentivize local waste workers to collect and
recycle plastic in some of the most polluted areas of
the world.
That idea, that knowing that 80% of land-based marine
debris is coming from areas of poverty, lies a part of
the solution as well.
But this isn't just altruism. Plastic Bank is
for profit and so is RePurpose Global.
Both are making big money by partnering with companies
like SC Johnson, Henkel, Burt's Bees and hundreds of
smaller brands, which pay to source recycled material
themselves and or help offset their plastic
production by funding local plastic collection and
processing in communities that lack reliable municipal
waste management.
We are removing over 15 million pounds of plastic
from the environment every single year, and we're on
track to triple it by the end of this year actually.
We have over 500 recycling branches around the world,
we've collected just under 4 billion bottles.
That equates to something around 80,000 tonnes of
material that we've collected and returned to
circularity.
While RePurpose and the Plastic Bank aim to help
companies reduce their use of virgin plastic, they also
sell plastic credits to help their partners offset
the waste that they do create. One credit
represents one kilogram of plastic that's been
collected from the environment and, if
possible, recycled.
The concept is similar to carbon credits, with all the
attendant criticisms over lack of standardization and
the potential for greenwashing.
We need to make sure that plastic credits don't enable
business as usual.
But Katz says that his organization can help to
alter the fundamental economics of plastic
collection and recycling, making it a worthwhile
endeavor for both waste collectors and global brands
alike.
A proper offset model creates infrastructure that
will collect mass volumes of material over the course
of time, not just pay for the collection of one
product.
Cumulatively, humanity has produced over 9.5 billion
metric tons of plastic.
That's over one metric ton, aka 2,200 pounds per each of
the Earth's 7.9 billion inhabitants.
All the plastic we've ever produced since the inception
of the material is still here.
If you yourself remember a small toy you played with
when you were a child, it's still here somewhere.
Remember that coffee cup lid that you took ten years
ago? It's here somewhere still too.
Globally, only about 9% of plastic is recycled.
But that's not really because we don't have the
technology to recycle it.
For most plastics, we do.
It's because it's not economically feasible to
collect, clean, and sort it, at least in the U.S.
where virgin plastic is cheaper.
But Katz says that he's found a way to make the
economics work in the developing nations where
Plastic Bank operates.
Here's how it goes.
Plastic Bank's partner companies help to fund
informal waste collection efforts in one or multiple
of the countries where Plastic Bank operates -
Brazil, Egypt, Indonesia, and the Philippines.
Local plastic collectors often clean and sort their
material before dropping it off at Plastic Bank
collection centers, where it's weighed and sent to
local processors. There it's further sorted and
shred into flakes. Local processors might turn the
flakes into pellets themselves or ship the
flakes overseas to be turned into pellets, which
some of Plastic Bank's partners then buy at a
premium for use in new products.
Consider Plastic Bank something like the Uber for
recycling. It's a gig economy model that allows
anyone in the world to participate.
Based in Bali, Indonesia, Asis Wijayanto has been an
informal waste worker since 2000 and started working
with Plastic Bank in 2020.
In his village, there's only one garbage dumpster
for the whole community, which is frequently
overflowing.
Usually, I gather recyclable plastic from markets,
stores, and households, and bring it to my home.
Then, my wife helps clean and sort the plastic
materials.
I sort the plastic by color and type.
I separate the caps and the labels from the bottles.
Next, Asis loads up his truck and brings the bags to
a Plastic Bank collection center, where he's paid for
the market value of the material, plus a premium
that Plastic Bank provides, allowing him and his wife to
support themselves and their daughter through
plastic collection alone. He says on an average day he
earns 300,000 rupiah, or about $20, a modest income
but well above the international poverty line
of $2.15 per day per person.
The money we earn from collecting plastic is used
to support our family's daily necessities and to pay
our daughter’s tuition fee.
The more that a collector or a household would collect,
the more frequently, the more consistently they would
return the material, over the course of time they earn
a credit score, ultimately, creating this monetary
standard out of materials.
One of Plastic Bank's founding partners, SC
Johnson, has supported the buildout of 491 collection
centers in parts of the Philippines, Indonesia, and
Brazil that lack formal, reliable waste management
infrastructure. The company now uses 100% recycled
plastic, which it buys from Plastic Bank, in all of its
Windex spray bottles. And out of all the plastic that
SC Johnson sold in 2021, 19% was recycled.
It's aiming for 25% by 2025.
Plastic Bank has over 30,000 collection members like
Aregistered on its platform, and those that
reach a certain quota can gain access to additional
benefits like health insurance. When ACS was
collecting more frequently, Plastic Bank paid his
insurance premium.
BPJS health insurance from Plastic Bank is very helpful
for my health treatments, because I have a lung
disease and the insurance helps me to access medical
services for free.
And Plastic Bank profits too.
The company is estimating that it will bring in $60
million in revenue this year, and the organization
is planning to expand in Cameroon and Thailand, where
it's currently running pilots. But though the
United States' plastic recycling rate has fallen to
an abysmal 5 or 6%, Katz says that Plastic Bank's
model doesn't really make economic sense in countries
with more formalized waste management sectors, where
the cost of collection, cleaning, and sorting is
much higher.
In the developed world, when you've got $30 an hour
employees on the back of a $300,000 truck that are
going through streets to collect material to return
it to a $20 million facility, the economics
might not work as well for a bag, where you have to
collect so many to retrieve a kilo of material.
But in the developing world where you've got a household
collecting their material and bringing it back to a
community that then brings it back to a processor, you
remove all of those costs and the economics work much
more soundly there.
Every year, about 400 million metric tons of
virgin plastic are produced. And though experts
agree that moving away from plastic packaging and
sourcing recycled materials are the most effective means
of addressing this crisis, there's also an emerging
market for plastic credits, meant to help companies
offset their virgin plastic production by funding waste
collection and recycling efforts elsewhere.
And this is actually what most of Plastic Bank's
partners are doing. Out of over 75 partners, the
company says that over 60 are buying plastic credits,
but not recycled plastic from Plastic Bank and over
15 are buying recycled plastic, but not credits.
But experts like Grabowski say that it's far preferable
to actually use recycled material yourself.
We really want to see that companies are first really
cleaning up their own house, right?
Looking at their own portfolio, making reductions
and working on things like reuse and thinking about
changing to responsible sources for the plastic that
they do need before they're looking at something like
credits.
By funding collection efforts and buying credits,
a company can earn Plastic Bank's net-zero or
net-negative designation, meaning they're removing and
recycling as much plastic as they make or more.
Plastic Bank says that some companies have achieved
net-zero and net-negative status, but would not
disclose who or how many.
But the World Wildlife Fund opposes terms like these -
borrowed lingo from the carbon credit market that
Grabowski says is misleading.
If you bought a plastic product and it said that it
was plastic neutral, what would you interpret that to
mean, right? Would you think that that meant this
product has no impact?
Because that isn't true.
99% of plastic is made from fossil fuels.
It impacts our climate. It impacts communities around
the world. And the fact that someone cleaned that
piece up does not negate all of this other lifecycle
impacts.
Katz doesn't think that we'll ever see a
plastic-free world though, and thus views utilizing the
plastic that's already in our environment as the
ultimate solution.
You know, I'm sorry to say that we're never going to
move away from plastic. It's not going to occur.
It's inevitable.
And there's 10,000,000,000,000 kilograms
of plastic on the earth.
Another company in this space, RePurpose Global,
calls itself the world's leading plastic action
platform. It sells software to its partner companies,
helping them to measure their plastic footprint, set
internal plastic reduction targets, and purchase
plastic credits.
So we help brands look at all of these different
pieces holistically and reduce their plastic
footprint overall, both internally within their own
supply chains as well as externally in the natural
environment.
RePurpose works with over 250 brands, over 150 of
which are designated "plastic neutral" and over
80 of which are considered "plastic negative", which
according to RePurpose's standards, means that these
companies remove at least twice as much plastic from
the environment as they put in, recycling all the
material that it's technically possible to.
To generate credits, RePurpose partners with
local organizations on the ground in the United States,
the Dominican Republic, Colombia, Ghana, Kenya,
Indonesia, and India to support the build out of
waste management and recycling infrastructure.
So these can be nonprofits, these can be private sector
waste management organizations, these can be
waste worker unions and cooperatives.
The models really differ.
But what we look for is a solution that actually works
on the ground being implemented by people who
know what they're doing, who really understand the
local landscape.
RePurpose wouldn't reveal its annual revenue, but said
that it's upwards of $1 million and growing quickly.
The company accepts all types of plastic,
subsidizing the collection of chips bags and tiny
packets known as sachets, which aren't recyclable but
are widely used in the developing world to sell
tiny portions of everyday products like shampoo or
laundry detergent.
Typically, we follow something called an impact
equivalency matrix.
So what this means is brands need to remove
plastic that is quote unquote as detrimental to
the environment as what they are using or worse.
RePurpose sends its non-recyclable waste to
cement kilns, where it's burned to create energy for
cement production. Balasubramanian claims that
this is still a net-positive outcome,
because it reduces the use of coal.
Plastic Bank only accepts recyclable plastic, as Katz
says that it just doesn't make economic sense for them
to incentivize the collection of sachets which
have no inherent economic value.
Both RePurpose and the Plastic Bank are helping to
develop standards for the emerging plastic credits
market, working with the nonprofit Verra, which
operates one of the most widely used carbon crediting
programs, to do so.
But voluntary carbon offsets have been plagued
with problems for years.
And just a few months ago, an investigation found the
grand majority of Verra's certified rainforest carbon
offsets to be worthless, findings that Verra
described as patently unreliable. Balasubramanian
points out that the two markets do have some key
differences.
We're not thinking about avoidance, we're thinking
about actual recovery, right?
So we're not calculating what was avoided from the
oceans, in a sense we're actually calculating what we
recovered. And so the math becomes a lot easier.
For Katz's part, he says that it's important to
support the emerging plastic credits market as it
develops.
The best is the enemy of the good enough, and that what
we need to be doing today is implement stuff.
Let's not vilify those who are trying and give space
for it to emerge and evolve.
And while Grabowski does see the potential of plastic
credits to help build circular waste management
systems by incentivizing local waste workers, she
worries that credits will distract from the real
regulatory changes that are necessary to address the
plastic crisis on a global scale.
Rather than really focusing on voluntary initiatives
like credits, which are all voluntary, we want to see
companies actually advocate also for mandatory measures
like extended producer responsibility, as well as
the Global Plastic Treaty, which is currently being
negotiated.
Extended producer responsibility laws are
designed to make producers responsible for their
product's end of life impacts by factoring in the
cost of disposal and processing into the upfront
price. Some states, including Maine, Oregon,
Colorado, and California, already have EPR laws on the
books for plastic packaging, as do countries
throughout Europe. Many hope that policies like this
will be incentivized by the Global Plastic Pollution
Treaty, which is currently being negotiated after the
UN voted last year to create a legally binding
international agreement to end plastic pollution.
That's a good beginning, and we see tens and tens of
countries now implementing extended producer
responsibility schemes.
It's not enough. It's not fast enough.
More needs to occur.
More policy needs to change.
And we are combating big oil.
So there's a lot of work to be done.
After all, fossil fuels are the building blocks of
plastic. And as the world transitions to renewable
energy, plastic is set to become the largest driver of
global oil demand. To combat this, Grabowski says
that we need all hands on deck.
We're going to need a multitude of solutions to
solve this, and everyone has to do their part.
That means we're going to need strong policy to
realign incentives for all kinds of people and
stakeholders. It means that we're going to need
businesses to think about also reduction and reuse, as
well as things like credits.
And it means that people like you and me also need to
change our behavior. But first, we need the options
to be able to choose that right?
So we need everyone to do their part.