SINGAPORE / VARANASI, India (Reuters) – A wheelbarrow and a handful of metal litter traps, emblazoned with the words ‘Renew Oceans’, are rusting outside an empty padlocked office in the Indian city of Varanasi, a short walk from the Ganges.
It’s all that remains of a program, funded by some of the world’s largest oil and chemical companies, that they believe could solve a runaway ocean plastic waste crisis affecting marine life – from plankton to whales – and tropical beaches and coral clogged. reefs.
The closure of Renew Oceans, which has not been previously reported, is a sign that an industry whose financial future is tied to the growth of plastic production is not meeting its goals of curbing the resulting increase in waste, two environmental groups said.
The Alliance to End Plastic Waste, a Singapore-based non-profit organization founded two years ago by major oil and chemical companies, said on its website in November 2019 that its partnership with Renew Oceans would expand to the world’s most polluted rivers and “could eventually stop the flow of plastic to the planet’s ocean.”
Exxon Mobil Corp, Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Dow Inc, Chevron Phillips Chemical Co and approximately 50 other companies have committed to spend $ 1.5 billion on the Alliance and its projects over five years. The Alliance has not publicly stated how much money it has raised from its members or what it has spent in total.
The Alliance confirmed to Reuters that Renew Oceans had stopped working, in part because of the new coronavirus, which had halted some work.
“Without a foreseeable reboot timeframe, coupled with other implementation challenges, the Alliance and Renew Oceans jointly agreed on a mutual termination agreement in October 2020,” Alliance spokeswoman Jessica Lee told Reuters.
Anne Rosenthal, attorney at the US law firm Hurwit & Associates, representative of Renew Oceans, also said she expected the project to fail. “While it has made significant progress in addressing the plastic waste problem, the organization has concluded that it simply does not have the capacity to operate at the scale this problem deserves,” she said.
The alliance, with a staff of about 50, mainly based in Singapore, has other projects in the pipeline, but they are small, community-based efforts or have not yet been realized. “It is important to note that the full impact of projects will be realized when they are implemented at full scale,” said Lee.
Renew Oceans has published on its website targets to collect 45 tons of plastic waste from the Ganges by 2019 and 450 tons by 2020. Neither the Alliance nor Renew Oceans has released any information on their progress towards those goals. Four people involved in the project told Reuters that it collected less than a ton of waste from the Ganges before closing in March last year after operating for less than six months.
The Alliance and Renew Oceans declined to comment on the amount of waste the project collected. Scientists estimate that more than half a million tons of plastic waste enters the Ganges every year. There is no government data on how much of it is collected.
‘ONE OF THE BEST PROJECTS’
At the Alliance launch event in January 2019, streamed live by National Geographic, Jim Fitterling, CEO of Dow, said Renew Oceans is “one of the best projects we have.”
The Alliance and Renew Oceans said they would deploy state-of-the-art technology to collect and recycle plastic waste, including “ reverse vending machines ” that pick up plastic waste and hand out vouchers for taxi rides and groceries, and pyrolysis machines to turn plastic waste into diesel. change.
Prototypes of those devices were deployed in Varanasi but frequently failed to work, the four people involved in the project told Reuters. The Alliance and Renew Oceans declined to comment on the technology’s performance.
Renew Oceans has not expanded operations beyond its Varanasi pilot project, the Alliance said in response to questions from Reuters. Renew Oceans declined comment.
The Alliance said it has invested $ 5 million in Renew Oceans over a two-year period. It said some of that had been returned to the Alliance and more are expected to be returned once Renew Oceans ended its operations.
Exxon and Shell addressed Reuters’ questions to the Alliance. Dow and Chevron Phillips did not respond to requests for comment.
The alliance’s goal was “to dispose of millions of tons of plastic waste in more than 100 high-risk cities around the world” for five years. So far, the group has announced more than a dozen programs, including Renew Oceans, but is well behind that goal.
In two years, only three small-scale projects funded by the Alliance, including Renew Oceans, have collected waste, according to information published by the Alliance and its partners. A cleanup in Ghana has collected 300 tons of plastic waste, the Alliance said. Another Alliance project in the Philippines said on its website that it recycled 21 tons of plastic waste.
There is no centralized source of data on plastic waste pollution around the world. But the available data suggests that even at full scale, these projects would address only a fraction of the problem and are far from meeting the Alliance’s own goals of keeping millions of tons of plastic waste out of the ocean.
Indonesia and India, for example, produce more than 3 million tons of plastic waste every year that is not collected or recycled, according to United Nations and national figures.
“AEPW’s programs are trivial in scope and not replicable to really reduce the massive amount of global plastic pollution,” said Jan Dell, an independent chemical engineer using the Alliance acronym.
The plastics industry is publicizing its efforts to recycle and manage plastic waste, but is spending far more on expanding production than recycling, which has become unprofitable with the proliferation of cheap virgin plastic, Reuters reported in October.
Chevron Phillips used footage of Renew Oceans employees collecting plastic on the Ganges in a video promoting their sustainability efforts in July, even though the project was halted in March.
“These are some of the richest and most powerful companies in the world, and what they’ve come up with are some small community waste collection projects that provide great photo opportunities,” said John Hocevar, Ocean Campaigns Director, Greenpeace USA. “There is no way to reduce plastic waste without reducing plastic production.”
Chevron Phillips did not respond to a request for comment.
Reporting by Joe Brock and John Geddie in Singapore, Saurabh Sharma in Varanasi; Additional reporting by Aradhana Aravindan in Singapore; Editing by Bill Rigby