SINGAPORE / VARANASI, India (Reuters) – A wheelbarrow and a handful of wire mesh nets, inscribed with the words “Renew Oceans”, are rusty in front of an empty padlocked office in the Indian city of Varanasi, a short walk from the Ganges.
All that is left of a program, funded by some of the world’s largest oil and chemical companies, said it could solve an ocean plastic waste crisis that destroys marine life – from plankton to whales – and clogs it. tropical and coral beaches. reef.
The closure of the oceans, which has not been reported before, is a sign that an industry whose financial future is tied to increased plastic production is not falling within its goals of reducing the resulting increase in waste, according to the two environmental groups.
Alliance to End Plastic Waste, a Singapore-based nonprofit group founded two years ago by major oil and chemical companies, said on its website in November 2019 that its partnership with Renew Oceans will be extended to the most polluted rivers. from the world and “could eventually stop the flow of plastic in the planet’s ocean. ”
Exxon Mobil Corp., Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Dow Inc., Chevron Phillips Chemical Co. and 50 other companies have pledged $ 1.5 billion over five years to the Alliance and its projects. The alliance did not say publicly how much money it raised from its members or what it spent in general.
The alliance confirmed to Reuters that Renew Oceans has stopped working, partly due to the new coronavirus, which has stopped some work.
“Without a predictable timeframe for restarting, combined with other implementation challenges, the Alliance and Renew Oceans jointly decided on a mutual termination agreement in October 2020,” Alliance spokeswoman Jessica Lee told Reuters.
Anne Rosenthal, an adviser to US law firm Hurwit & Associates, which represents Renew Oceans, also said she expects the project to tip. “Although it has made significant progress in addressing the issue of plastic waste, the organization has come to the conclusion that it simply does not have the capacity to work on the scale that this issue deserves,” she said.
The alliance, with a staff of about 50, based in Singapore, has other ongoing projects, but they are small, community-based efforts or have not yet been completed. “It’s important to remember that the full impact of projects will be realized when their operations are 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 nor Renew Oceans have published any information on their progress in achieving these objectives. Four people involved in the project told Reuters that they collected less than a tonne of waste from the Ganges before it closed in March last year, after less than six months of operation.
Alliance and Renew Oceans declined to comment on the amount of waste collected by the project. Scientists estimate that more than half a million tons of plastic waste enter the Ganges every year. There is no government data on how much is collected.
“ONE OF THE BEST PROJECTS”
At the Alliance’s launch event in January 2019, broadcast live by National Geographic, Dow CEO Jim Fitterling said Renew Oceans is “one of the best projects we have.”
The Alliance and Renew Oceans have said they will implement state-of-the-art technology for collecting and recycling plastic waste, including “reversible vending machines” that take plastic sheets and give vouchers for money from taxi rides and food and pyrolysis devices to transform plastic garbage in diesel.
The prototypes of these devices were deployed in Varanasi, but they malfunctioned regularly, the four people involved in the project told Reuters. The Alliance and Renew Oceans declined to comment on the technology’s performance.
Renew Oceans did not extend operations beyond the Varanasi pilot project, the Alliance said in response to questions from Reuters. Renew Oceans declined to comment.
The alliance said it had invested $ 5 million in Renew Oceans over a two-year period. He said some of these had been returned to the Alliance and more were expected to be returned once Renew Oceans had completed its operations.
Exxon and Shell directed Reuters questions to the Alliance. Dow and Chevron Phillips did not respond to requests for comment.
The alliance has set a goal of “redirecting millions of tons of plastic waste to more than 100 hazardous cities around the globe” over five years. So far, the group has announced more than a dozen programs, including Renew Oceans, but it is far from 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 clean-up effort in Ghana has collected 300 tons of plastic waste, the Alliance said. Another Alliance project in the Philippines said on its website that it had recycled 21 tons of plastic waste.
There is no centralized source of data on plastic waste pollution worldwide. But the available data suggest that, even on a full scale, those projects would address only a fraction of the problem and fall far short of the Alliance’s goals of keeping millions of tonnes of plastic waste out of the ocean.
For example, Indonesia and India produce more than 3 million tonnes of plastic waste per year that is not collected or recycled, according to United Nations and national figures.
“AEPW programs are trivial in scale and cannot be reproduced to make a real reduction in the massive amount of global plastic pollution,” said Jan Dell, an independent chemical engineer using the Alliance’s acronym.
The plastics industry has made public its efforts to recycle and manage plastic waste, but is spending much more on expanding production than recycling, which has become uneconomical with the proliferation of new cheap plastics, Reuters reported in October.
Chevron Phillips used images of Renew Oceans workers collecting plastic on the Ganges in a video promoting its sustainability efforts in July, even though the project stopped operations in March.
“These are some of the richest and most powerful companies on the planet and have come up with a few small garbage collection projects in the community that offer beautiful photography opportunities,” said John Hocevar, Director of Ocean Campaigns, 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 of Aradhana Aravindan in Singapore; Montage by Bill Rigby