Pledges: Plastic Clearing

Our work so far:

In one year orders placed with Healthy Supplies led to over 384kg of ocean bound plastic being recovered. That is the equivalent of over 30,000 plastic bottles. Ocean bound plastic includes a range of harmful inclusions like plastic fishing nets, plastic bottles, packets and more!

What is the environmental impact of clearing plastic?

More than 350 million tonnes of plastic is produced every year – half of which is intended for single use, and less than 10% of which is ever recycled. From this astronomic total, only about 2.3% ends up in the oceans, yet this still means that 8 million tonnes of waste are added every year, the equivalent of a garbage truck dumped every minute. This is increasing rapidly, and it is estimated that plastic may outweigh fish in the ocean by 2050.

Our best chance against ocean plastic is to tackle it at source: as much as one quarter of all ocean plastic — 2 million tonnes a year — originates from just 10 rivers. Eight of these are in Southeast Asia, the last two in Africa. In this lies a huge opportunity: not only is it possible to organise cost-effective plastic cleanup operations, but with the right business model, this cleanup can simultaneously provide high wages to hard-working, disadvantaged locals - the very same locals who have been shortchanged by globalisation, with no realistic capacity to caretake the environment given their current socio-economic conditions.

Healthy Supplies have partnered with Verdn to support Empower AS. Empower is creating a solution to the plastic waste problem by giving plastic a value. They are cleaning up the world while fighting poverty by providing a wage to those in need.

Empower operates by setting up collection points around the world together with local partners (NGOs or charities). Once set up, these partners issue financial rewards in exchange for plastic deposits. All plastic is digitally registered upon collection, allowing Empower to trace the recovered plastic back up the supply chain, and keeping tabs on how it ends up being reused.

The plastic is cleaned up by underprivileged locals in poor communities. The plastic collection is a huge opportunity for these waste pickers, as they are given a fixed amount of money per kilo of plastic collected. Locals that choose to be waste pickers can multiply their daily income – which for them means food, security and opportunity.

Empower has already organised cleanups in more than 15 countries, including those that see the Niger, Mekong and Ganges rivers flow through them (all of these are among the world’s top 10 most polluted).