Helping to create a sustainable market for plastic waste

They’re in the cars people drive, the appliances in their kitchens and the devices they use to connect with the world. Perhaps the most prominent impact of plastics, and the single biggest usage category worldwide, has been in packaging. The many beneficial properties of plastic — among them lightness, durability and overall versatility — has made it the de facto choice for packaged goods the world over.

But for all its economic and functional benefits, the steady growth of plastics-based packaging has also fueled a vast increase in the volume of waste, especially among “single-use” packages such as plastic bottles and bags. Put simply, plastic waste has a containment issue. Each year, millions of tons of plastic bypass recycling facilities and leak into the environment, ending up in landfills or the world’s oceans, where it can persist for decades.

Recognizing the gravity of the plastic waste problem, governments, non-government organizations (NGOs) and companies are proposing diverse and innovative plans for mitigating it. In 2019, a diverse group of major players in the plastics value chain — including companies that make, use, sell, process, collect and recycle plastics — joined forces to form the Alliance to End Plastic Waste. With more than 65 organizations on board, the Alliance’s global roster of members has committed more than USD 1 billion to projects intended to stop the flow of plastics into the environment and mitigate the damage that’s already been done.

It was early in the summer of 2020, and Nicholas Kolesch — freshly hired as VP of Projects for the Alliance — had just arrived in Singapore, where the organization is based. On this sunny weekend, Nicholas had brought his family to the shoreline to see some of its famous mangrove forests. Even here, in a city-state equally famous for its cleanliness and order, plastic waste clung to the mangroves, whose knotty roots made them, in Nicholas’s words, the “perfect trap” for plastic. “It was sad to see such a beautiful place literally choked with plastic waste,” he says. “We knew it was coming from the sea, and we knew it was coming from a place where there is no municipal solid waste system.”

In his brief anecdote, Nicholas effectively captures how various “leaks” in the plastics value chain — an ecosystem that spans from raw materials extraction to plastic consumption and end of life — have made plastic waste a global problem. That plastic he saw? The chances are high that it, like most ocean waste worldwide, originated up a major river, tens, hundreds or even thousands of miles away, in a “hot spot” city where plastic waste management facilities are either lacking or unable to keep up with local disposal volumes.

While an awareness of the scope of the problem is a good starting point, what does taking action to solve it look like? Much of it comes down to investing: in physical infrastructure like recycling facilities, in innovative technologies, in cleanup efforts and in educational programs, to name a few. For the diverse plastics industry stakeholders around the world who aim to take collective, coordinated action, data is critical to guiding their efforts. They face big-picture questions, such as where are the biggest leaks in the plastics value chain around the world, and why?

But they also need to look at the nitty-gritty details at the local level to test the feasibility of projects and to determine, for example, the ideal size, scope and location of a facility. The kinds of information needed to make these analyses — ranging from existing plastic waste volumes and solid waste processing facilities to local attitudes and behavior patterns — are hard to find, and even harder to build a broad consensus of agreement on. It’s a condition Nicholas and his Alliance colleagues refer to as “the data gap.”

“There are literally thousands of data sources around the world related to the plastics value chain, and that number is constantly growing with every new study that’s published,” Nicholas explains. “But there’s also a lack of consistency across data sets and data collection methodologies, things like how plastic waste is defined and how consumption is measured. That means large-scale investment decisions, like where to build a recycling plant to mitigate plastic leakage, are being based on selectively available information with different baselines.”

It’s no trivial issue. Like all investments, investing in green infrastructure is about both risk and return. Before committing capital to a project, stakeholders need information that is both complete and trustworthy. Complete means there’s enough data to make decisions. Trustworthy means that the source — the provenance — of the data, and any related assumptions or caveats, is clear and traceable. Lack of either freezes up decision-making and thus poses a direct barrier to action.

Within the extended global plastic community, the Alliance defines its role as a facilitator of action. In that capacity, the organization convenes its members to make collaborative decisions. And just as important, it provides the tools to make that collaboration more efficient and fruitful. In late 2020, the Alliance decided to take action to close the data gap.

It didn’t come out of nowhere. In the preceding months, the Alliance’s leaders and key members had a number of conceptual discussions about creating a kind of hub for bringing data together – a global information platform. To ensure data quality and consistency, they envisioned a filtering system that would provide rigorous controls on the data sources that were brought into the system. And they would build in analytics to amplify the value of the data to stakeholders.

In the course of a high-level meeting, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Dow Chemical, a major founding member of the Alliance, brought up the issue with IBM’s then CEO, Ginni Rometty. Before long, Nicholas and other Alliance leaders were engaged in brainstorming sessions with the IBM Garage™ — a framework for transformation that combines people, processes and technology. The Singapore-based team was led by Praveen Hariharan, an IBM® Consulting Partner focused on sustainability issues. “When we got into the picture, we told them we could gather a team and put together a working prototype — something they could touch and feel — in a few weeks,” says Praveen. “They wanted a fast start, so we followed the IBM Garage Methodology and made it into an MVP [minimum viable product].”

As Praveen explains, IBM and the Alliance followed an iterative approach, from the ideation stage to build and scale. “By leveraging the IBM Garage methodology — even in a completely remote working environment, spread across five regions — we were able to bring together an open, seamless set of practices with a human-centric, outcome-first approach,” he says. “By applying design thinking, agile development and DevOps tools and techniques, the entire work was executed leveraging the new ways of working.”

To Jacob Duer, President and CEO of the Alliance, the PRISM project fits into the Alliance’s broad mission of creating the infrastructure necessary for a “circular economy” for plastic. “Since 2019, we have been building up a pipeline of projects in various stages of implementation in different parts of the world,” says Jacob. “Project by project, our investments in innovation and infrastructure are moving us closer to plastic circularity.”

Jacob notes that Project STOP demonstrates how local solutions — following a scalable, self-sustaining model — can help to address the global problem of plastic waste proliferation. “By investing in collection and waste processing, we are reducing the risk of plastic waste leakage into the environment, while making material available for recycling to help us move from a linear make-use-dispose model, to a circular one,” says Jacob. “By helping them close the data gap, PRISM brings this vision one step closer.”

Based in Singapore, the Alliance to End Plastic Waste is an industry-founded and funded non-governmental and non-profit organization whose goal is to promote solutions that reduce and avoid environmental pollution from plastic waste, especially in the oceans. Its founding members include BASF, Chevron Phillips Chemical, Dow Chemical, ExxonMobil, Mitsubishi Chemical Holdings, Proctor & Gamble and Shell. The Alliance announced its plans to invest USD 1.5 billion by 2024 to reduce plastic pollution and increase recycling efforts. As of September 2020, the group reported having spent USD 400 million on projects in Southeast Asia, Africa and India.