By Joe Brock, John Geddie and Saurabh Sharma
SINGAPORE / VARANASI, India (Reuters) – A wheelbarrow and a handful of metal grills to catch rubbish, with the words ‘Renew Oceans’, with rust outside an empty, padded office in the Indian city of Varanasi of the Ganges.
It’s all that remains of a program funded by some of the world’s largest oil and chemical companies, which they say could solve a runaway crisis in the plastic waste of the ocean, which kills marine life – from plankton to whales – and tropical can clog beaches and coral. riwwe.
The closure of Renew Oceans, which has not been previously reported, is a sign that two industries whose financial future is linked to the growth of plastic production are not achieving the goals of limiting the resulting increase in waste, according to two environmental groups. .
The Alliance to End Plastic Waste, a non-profit group in Singapore founded two years ago by major oil and chemical companies, said on its website in November 2019 that its partnership with Renew Oceans would be extended to the world’s most polluted rivers and ‘can 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 about 50 other companies have committed to spend $ 1.5 billion over five years on the Alliance and its projects. The Alliance did not say publicly how much money it had raised from its members or what it was spending in general.
The Alliance confirmed to Reuters that Renew Oceans has stopped working, in part because of the new coronavirus, which has halted some work.
“Without any predictable time frame for restarting, coupled with other implementation challenges, the Alliance and Renew Oceans have jointly decided to enter into a mutual termination agreement in October 2020,” Alliance spokeswoman Jessica Lee told Reuters.
Anne Rosenthal, lawyer for the American law firm Hurwit & Associates, which represents Renew Oceans, also said he expects the project to fold. “Although it has made significant progress in tackling the problem of plastic waste, the organization has come to the conclusion that it simply does not have the capacity to work on the scale that the problem deserves,” she said.
The Alliance, with about 50 staff members, mostly in Singapore, has other projects in the pipeline, but these are small community-based efforts or have not yet been established. “It is important to note that the full impact of projects will be realized if their operations are at full scale,” Lee said.
Renew Oceans has published targets on its website to collect 45 tonnes of plastic waste from the Ganges in 2019 and 450 tonnes in 2020. Neither the Alliance of Renew Oceans has published any information about their progress in achieving the targets. Four people involved in the project told Reuters that it had collected less than one tonne of waste from the Ganges before it was closed in March last year after less than six months in operation.
The Alliance and Renew Oceans declined to comment on the amount of waste the project collected. Scientists estimate more than half a million tons of plastic debris in the Ganges each year. There is no government data on how much of it is collected.
‘ONE OF THE BEST PROJECTS’
During the launch event for the Alliance in January 2019, live through National Geographic, Dow CEO Jim Fitterling said Renew Oceans is “one of the best projects we have.”
The Alliance and Renew Oceans said they would use the latest technology to collect and recycle plastic waste, including “inverted vending machines” that pick up plastic garbage and issue vouchers for money for taxi rides and groceries, and pyrolysis machines. to turn plastic junk into diesel.
The four people involved in the project deployed prototypes of the devices in Varanasi, but function regularly. The Alliance and Renew Oceans declined to comment on the performance of the technology.
Renew Oceans did not expand the operations beyond the pilot project in Varanasi, the Alliance said in response to Reuters’ questions. Renew Oceans declined to comment.
The Alliance said it had invested $ 5 million in Renew Oceans over a two-year period. It is said that some of it has been returned to the Alliance and that more are expected to be returned once Renew Oceans has ceased operations.
Exxon and Shell addressed Reuters’ questions to the Alliance. Dow and Chevron Phillips did not respond to requests for comment.
The Alliance has set a goal to ‘lead millions of tons of plastic waste in more than 100 dangerous cities around the world’ over five years. So far, the group has announced more than a dozen programs, including Renew Oceans, but that is far from the goal.
In two years, only three small-scale projects funded by the Alliance, including Renew Oceans, have collected any waste, according to information published by the Alliance and its partners. A clean-up operation in Ghana has collected 300 tonnes 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 central source for data on plastic waste pollution worldwide. But the available data suggest that these projects, even at full scale, will address only a fraction of the problem and that it is still far less than the Alliance’s own targets of keeping millions of tonnes of plastic waste out of the ocean.
Indonesia and India, for example, both produce more than 3 million tonnes of plastic waste per year that are not collected or recycled, according to United Nations and national figures.
“AEPW’s programs are trivial and not repeatable to reduce the enormous amount of global plastic pollution,” said Jan Dell, an independent chemical engineer, abbreviating the Alliance.
The plastics industry has announced its efforts to recycle and manage plastic waste, but spends far more on expanding production than recycling, which has been made uneconomical by distributing cheap new plastics, Reuters reported in October.
Chevron Phillips used footage of Renew Oceans’ workers collecting plastic on the Ganges in a video that promoted its sustainability efforts in July, though the project was halted in March.
“These are some of the richest and most powerful companies on the planet, and what they came up with are some small projects that choose community garbage to provide great photo opportunities,” said John Hocevar, director of Ocean Campaigns, Greenpeace USA, said. “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)