
Renew Oceans, a nonprofit organization that sought to reduce ocean plastic pollution in river-adjacent communities in the developing world, has closed, according to an article dated Jan. 17 from Reuters. The organization had announced that it would begin a dedicated project near the Ganges riverbanks in Varanasi, India, known as Renew Ganga, that was funded in part by the Alliance to End Plastic Waste (AEPW), a nonprofit established in 2019 by companies from the plastics and consumer goods value chain. The National Geographic Society also supported the project.
According to the Reuters article, the AEPW invested $5 million in Renew Oceans over a two-year period. The project was supposed to improve the collection of end-of-life plastics and facilitate the sale of all plastic bottles for conventional recycling, while nonbottle plastics were to be processed at satellite conversion facilities into renewable fuel, creating a circular economy for plastics.
AEPW member companies include BASF Corp., Berry Global Inc., LyondellBasell, PolyOne, Procter & Gamble, SABIC, Suez and Veolia.
Renew Oceans planned to capture plastic waste from the 10 major rivers shown to carry the majority of land-based waste to the ocean before it reaches the ocean.
According to the Reuters article, “Renew Oceans published targets on its website to collect 45 [metric tons] of plastic trash from the Ganges in 2019 and 450 [metric tons] in 2020. Neither the Alliance nor Renew Oceans has published any information on their progress in reaching those targets. Four people involved in the project told Reuters it collected less than one [metric ton] of waste from the Ganges before it closed in March last year after less than six months in operation.”
Anne Rosenthal of the U.S. law firm Hurwit & Associates, which represents Renew Oceans, tells Reuters, “While it has made important progress in tackling the problem of plastic waste, the organization has come to the conclusion that it simply does not have the capacity to work at the scale this problem deserves.”
Ravi Alfreds, head of government and public affairs at AEPW, tells Recycling Today via email: “Unfortunately, the characterizations in the article were inaccurate in many ways and missed out many salient points. The Alliance to End Plastic Waste’s vision is to end plastic waste in the environment. Our mission is to identify, accelerate and ultimately scale solutions needed to achieve this vision; and hence we invest in many ideas and pioneering approaches to manage this complex challenge of plastic waste in the environment. The impact of investments into infrastructure and innovation projects like Renew Oceans is not immediate; and not every investment will bear results. That said, the Alliance has examples of projects that are already making considerable progress.
Continues Alfreds, “COVID-19 has thrown a lot of challenges for businesses and operations around the world. While we have seen delays due to COVID, we continue to see the passion and dedication of the Alliance forging ahead despite the logistical hurdles in the cities where our projects are located. For example, one of our projects, Project Stop Jembrana, just opened the first of 30 waste management facilities that will be built in Indonesia this year. This program will improve the lives of nearly 7 million people and make a substantial improvement to the plastic waste challenge. And there is our Closing the Loop project in Accra, Ghana. When fully operational, this will divert 500 tons of plastic waste a year and provide over a hundred jobs to the community.”
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