Fighting poverty with plastic

We are swim­ming in it, chil­dren are play­ing in it and restau­rants are serv­ing it. Ocean plas­tic can be found in bathing waters, on the beach and is swal­lowed by seafood, sub­se­quent­ly con­sumed by us.

More than five tril­lion pieces of plas­tic float in 360 mil­lion square kilo­me­tres of ocean. With eight mil­lion extra tonnes dumped every year, the fore­cast is more plas­tic than fish in the sea, by weight, by 2050.

Plas­tic waste is not just a big prob­lem, it is an expen­sive one. The recent New Plas­tics Econ­o­my report val­ued the 95 per cent of first-use plas­tic pack­ag­ing not recy­cled every year as con­sti­tut­ing a $80 to $120-bil­lion loss to the econ­o­my.

Peo­ple har­vest­ing the plas­tic trade it in for cred­its to use against essen­tials such as cloth­ing and tools

Mon­etis­ing this waste to bro­ker social and envi­ron­men­tal change is the busi­ness mod­el for the new, inno­v­a­tive and not-for-prof­it Plas­tic Bank, explains founder and chief exec­u­tive David Katz. “The mis­sion is to cre­ate a glob­al­ly recog­nis­able and trad­able cur­ren­cy that is plas­tic waste,” he says. “When we look at five tril­lion kilos of dis­card­ed plas­tic on the plan­et, at rough­ly 50 cents per kilo, it is a $2.5‑trillion val­ue ready to be unleashed and used.

“When we trade a new cur­ren­cy, what could it be used for? Could it be used for san­i­ta­tion projects or to cre­ate entre­pre­neurs who only accept plas­tic as cur­ren­cy? There are so many new ideas from so many places and so many dif­fer­ent peo­ple. What we have real­ly done is democ­ra­tised waste – that’s the beau­ty, the pow­er.”

How it works

The Plas­tic Bank offers an exchange plat­form built on blockchain dig­i­tal cur­ren­cy to incen­tivise col­lec­tion of plas­tic waste before it enters the ocean. With pover­ty alle­vi­a­tion a pri­or­i­ty, it oper­ates in dis­ad­van­taged glob­al com­mu­ni­ties, open­ing first in Haiti then the Philip­pines.

Reveal­ing the val­ue in used plas­tic encour­ages peo­ple to pick it up, lit­er­al­ly. Peo­ple har­vest­ing the plas­tic trade it in for cred­its to use against essen­tials such as cloth­ing and tools.

The Plas­tic Bank then recy­cles the col­lect­ed mate­r­i­al to pro­duce an eth­i­cal­ly sourced pel­let feed­stock for man­u­fac­tur­ing and 3D print­ing, known as social plas­tic.

The organisation’s mantra is “Gath­er togeth­er”, empha­sis­ing col­lect­ing the plas­tic waste as a col­lec­tive cul­ture. As the project works in spe­cif­ic geo­graph­ic areas at the cross­roads of pover­ty and plas­tic, col­lab­o­rat­ing with exist­ing local net­works is crit­i­cal to devel­op­ing and man­ag­ing com­mu­ni­ty infra­struc­ture.

Mr Katz says: “It is about scale. We recog­nise there are peo­ple already involved in help­ing alle­vi­ate the con­di­tions of pover­ty and injus­tice that have been oper­at­ing inter­na­tion­al­ly for decades. So we have man­aged to gath­er togeth­er some of the world’s largest NGOs, like World Vision with 46,000 staff in 100 dif­fer­ent coun­tries.”

Imple­ment­ed sus­tain­ably, trad­ing plas­tic to tack­le pover­ty rep­re­sents social empow­er­ment, not char­i­ty, con­cludes Angela Sun, writer, direc­tor and pre­sen­ter of award-win­ning doc­u­men­tary Plas­tic Par­adise: The Great Pacif­ic Garbage Patch: “Giv­ing val­ue to some­thing deemed val­ue­less makes it a com­mod­i­ty, shows tan­gi­ble, imme­di­ate results and instils a pur­pose in those in vul­ner­a­ble poor com­mu­ni­ties that would rather have a hand-up, not a hand-out.”

How it works