Business Collaborative Aims to Boost Plastics Recycling

Participants at the Vinyl360 conference learned how a group of CEOs from across the industry are trying to build infrastructure and make strides to address disposable plastic waste. The presentation came as companies across the vinyl value chain look for solutions to boost vinyl recycling.

Leslie Hushka, senior sustainability advisor, ExxonMobil, talked about how managing plastic waste will require combining the expertise of the whole value chain from raw materials to manufacturing. She heads the Alliance to End Plastic Waste, a CEO-led, cross-sector nonprofit that aims to catalyze public and private investment to help end plastic waste in the environment.

Hushka stressed that there is untapped value in good-use plastics that can be used to incentivize processing and collection. She explained that the Alliance has adopted an approach that includes:

• Combining experience from raw materials to waste management.
• Implementing on-the-ground projects and making investments in infrastructure.
• Deploying strategies to increase the value of plastic waste streams to support investment.
• Bringing together a broad coalition of partners.

“The material has inherent value,” she said, “so we need systems to recover and monetize it.”

$1.5 billion to boost global plastics recycling.

The Alliance has committed $1.5 billion over five years for a combination of Alliance-branded programs and company-sponsored direct investments in waste management or technologies that are supportive of the Alliance’s mission. The focus of these early investments is on the Asia-Pacific region, an area where the challenge is enormous and the infrastructure to address it is mostly nonexistent.

Hushka highlighted two Alliance country-specific projects. One is a project in Bali, Indonesia, to design integrated waste management systems with the goal of zero leakage of plastic waste into the ocean. The project aims to start locally and then expand across the island chain. The other is a collaboration with Renew Oceans focused on cleaning up the Ganges River through a combination of collecting plastic and empowering women-owned businesses to do the work. The aim is to divert 100,000 pounds of ocean-bound plastics in India in the first year.

On the technology side, the Alliance is funding the development of an open-source, science-based global information system to support waste management efforts with reliable data, metrics, and standards. The aim: to track plastic waste in order to design solutions to address it. Once built, the Alliance hopes to hand over the data platform to an independent scientific entity to monitor plastic waste—and hopefully help to accelerate the prevention of plastic waste from entering the environment.

Finally, Hushka stressed the importance of collaborating locally to design local solutions. To achieve this, the Alliance is working with two organizations in the Asia-Pacific region to develop local entrepreneurs who need assistance in building out their businesses. The aim is to incubate potential solutions so that they can be funded by an organization and move forward. The Alliance is also partnering with global innovation platform Plug and Play to set up End Plastic Waste Innovation Platforms in three hubs (Silicon Valley, Paris, and Singapore). The goal is to identify solutions in three primary areas: collecting, managing, and sorting plastic waste; recycling and processing technologies; and creating value from post-recycled plastics.