Five years after its billion-dollar founding, the Alliance to End Plastic Waste is taking what it learned from one-off projects and shifting its attention to country-scale change.
The group was founded in 2019 by companies at all places in the plastics value chain such as Berry Global, Chevron, Dow, ExxonMobil, LyondellBasell, Procter & Gamble and Shell. It recently announced the shift in focus.
Ted Toth, vice president of global programs and circularity, said in an interview with Plastics Recycling Update that the Alliance looked at the 80-plus projects it’s done around the world and decided it was time to work on a larger scale.
“They were great projects, individual projects, that were collection and sorting and investing in recycling technologies, etc.,” Toth said. “We had a lot of success, a few failures. I always say that we don’t learn anything from being successful.”
Now, the organization plans to take those learnings and “start doing things that change the entire system.”
“Instead of doing one here, one there and one there, [we will instead] pick a country — in our case, we picked three countries — and look at the overall gaps, whether it’s behavior change or doing a better job source separating, expanding collection, investing or helping people with sorting technologies or creating jobs for people to help improve the sorting,” he said.
First system-wide focus: Plastic film management
One big thing the Alliance has learned is the importance of developing end markets in tandem with collection, Toth said, because “we invested in a lot of recycling technologies and there are places that have warehouses full of pellets” but no local buyers.
The new direction has two arms: country-wide programs and thematic programs. Each program will receive over $100 million in collective financing. Country-level projects will be large-scale efforts to create systems change, while thematic projects are multi-country efforts to address global market gaps.
The first countries selected for system-wide projects are Indonesia, India and South Africa, and the first thematic project is focused on the research and development of recycling and collection methods for flexible films.
Toth said while there was discussion about choosing medical plastics or e-scrap as a thematic project, film is both ubiquitous and tough to handle.
“Humans don’t have a solution for that yet, but somewhere, in some university, there’s some kid who’s going to figure it out,” he said. “We just want to keep being in the space, keep investing in projects, until that next big thing comes around. So today we will invest in what we know, we’ll invest in the technologies that work, and even some of the borderline technologies that may not work now, but with a little push, we’ll get them to work.”
Systems change means looking at changing consumer behavior, expanding collection, improving sorting, investing in recycling technologies and developing end markets. The Alliance works with communities, municipal governments, national governments, the industry and development banks and private finance institutions.
While central or federal governments don’t have much to do with day-to-day waste management, Toth said having recycling set as a priority from the top down helps motivate municipalities.
The hope, he added, is that by demonstrating systems change in a few countries, other countries will follow the model even without involvement from the Alliance.
“If we do it right in one country, hopefully another country who’s just starting their journey will say, ‘Hey, what did they do in Indonesia? Let’s copy that or let’s replicate that. Let’s learn from that,'” Toth said. “That’s where we’re headed.”
Shift comes alongside evolving global plastic waste debate
In a press release, CEO Jacob Duer said the Alliance has always focused on improving the collection, sorting and recycling of plastic and has diverted more than 120,000 metric tons of plastic waste away from the environment since its inception.
“Our original mission to help end plastic waste is now guided by a North Star – to achieve a circular economy for plastics,” he said. “But we remain cognizant that full circularity can only be achieved via systems change.”
Duer noted that the Alliance will also add independent directors to its governance structure, from non-governmental organizations.
“Their inclusion is to enhance diversity of thought and bring new perspectives from beyond the private sector,” Duer added.
Since it was created, the Alliance has aimed to “play the role of convenor, bringing industry, governments, civil society, academia, and other stakeholders together to solve the plastic waste challenge,” Duer said, and “our evolving direction acknowledges that we have a transformational role to play as a source of solutions and knowledge at this critical time.”
As an example of its knowledge sharing, the Alliance offers the Plastic Waste Management Framework, an analysis of 192 countries’ “waste management maturity” and the Solution Model playbooks, which contain lessons from the Alliance’s projects. And while the Alliance doesn’t make or aim to influence policy, Toth said it’s happy to share information about extended producer responsibility (EPR) or other methods with governments that want to know more.
“Everybody’s at a different maturity level of implementing it, but for me, the encouraging thing is they are talking about it and they are implementing it,” he said of packaging EPR.
Similarly, he said he’s encouraged to see the level of discussion the United Nations global plastic treaty has generated, even if it is taking longer to create than originally planned.
“The thing we should all be encouraged about is that so many people are having the conversation,” he said. “Whether it’s an easy conversation or a difficult one, it needs to be had, and it needs to just continue. I think that the mindset globally is shifting.”
Duer noted that the Alliance “will continue to function as a global laboratory, trialling, iterating, and improving solutions that can be replicated by us or others and drive impact at scale.”
Toth added that continuing to move forward and be hopeful are a vital part of success, especially because “human nature loves to focus on the negative.”
New technology takes a lot of trial and error, he added, and persistence is key.
“It does work, it just may not work the first time,” he said. “It may not work the way you did it that time, but it works.”
The three secrets to global success are getting “a lot more capital mobilized,” bringing awareness and education to more people, and an unknown third, Toth said.
“The third thing that has to change maybe hasn’t been invented yet,” he said. “I think what we need to be doing is stay in the game, keep funding what we do, keep bringing awareness, keep bringing the funds until that big thing is invented, right? We can’t give up. We have to be persistent. We have to keep making progress towards solving this problem.”
