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By Joe Brock, John Geddie and Saurabh Sharma
SINGAPORE / VARANASI, India (Reuters) – A wheelbarrow and a handful of metal grates to capture trash, emblazoned with the words “Renew Oceans”, rust outside an empty, padlocked office in the Indian town of Varanasi, a short walk from the Ganges.
That’s all that’s left of a program, funded by some of the world’s largest oil and chemical companies, that they say could solve a growing plastic waste crisis in the oceans that is killing marine life – from plankton to whales – and clogs tropical beaches and corals. reefs.
The previously unreported shutdown of Renew Oceans is a sign that an industry whose financial future is tied to growth in plastic production is failing to meet its targets to curb the rise in resulting waste, according to two environmental groups.
The Alliance to End Plastic Waste, a Singapore-based non-profit group formed 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 rivers. most polluted in the world and “could ultimately stop the flow of plastic into the world’s ocean.
Exxon Mobil Corp, Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Dow Inc, Chevron Phillips Chemical Co and about 50 other companies have pledged to spend $ 1.5 billion over five years on the Alliance and its projects. The Alliance has not publicly said how much money it has raised from its members or what it has spent as a whole.
The Alliance confirmed to Reuters that Renew Oceans had stopped operating, in part because of the new coronavirus, which had halted some work.
“Without any foreseeable timeframe for the restart, combined with other implementation challenges, the Alliance and Renew Oceans have jointly agreed to reach a mutual termination agreement in October 2020,” the spokeswoman for Reuters told Reuters. The Alliance, Jessica Lee.
Anne Rosenthal, a lawyer at U.S. law firm Hurwit & Associates, representing Renew Oceans, also said she expects the project to end. “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 at the scale that this problem deserves” , she said.
The Alliance, which has about 50 employees, mainly based in Singapore, has other projects in the pipeline, but these are small community businesses or have not yet come to fruition. “It is important to note that the full impact of the projects will be realized when their operations are at full scale,” said Lee.
Renew Oceans has published on its website collection targets of 45 tonnes of plastic waste from the Ganges in 2019 and 450 tonnes in 2020. Neither the Alliance nor Renew Oceans have published information on their progress in achieving these goals. Four people involved in the project told Reuters they collected less than a ton of waste from the Ganges before it closed in March last year after less than six months of operation.
The Alliance and Renew Oceans declined to comment on the amount of waste collected by the project. Scientists estimate that more than half a million tonnes of plastic waste enters the Ganges each year. There is no government data on the amount of this collected.
“ ONE OF THE BEST PROJECTS ”
At the Alliance launch event in January 2019, broadcast live by National Geographic, Dow Managing Director Jim Fitterling said Renew Oceans was “one of the best projects we have.”
The Alliance and Renew Oceans said they would deploy cutting-edge technology to collect and recycle plastic waste, including “reverse vending machines” that collect plastic waste and distribute vouchers for cash on journeys in taxi, shopping and pyrolysis devices. to transform plastic waste into diesel.
Prototypes of these devices have been deployed in Varanasi but have regularly malfunctioned, 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 its operations beyond the pilot project in Varanasi, the Alliance said, in response to questions from Reuters. Renew Oceans declined to comment.
The Alliance said it invested $ 5 million in Renew Oceans over a two-year period. He said part of those funds had been returned to the Alliance and more should be returned once Renew Oceans ceases operations.
Exxon and Shell have directed Reuters’ questions to the Alliance. Dow and Chevron Phillips did not respond to requests for comment.
The Alliance has set a goal of “diverting millions of tonnes of plastic waste to more than 100 risky cities around the world” over five years. So far, the group has announced more than a dozen programs, including Renew Oceans, but falls short of that target.
In two years, only three small-scale projects funded by the Alliance, including Renew Oceans, have collected waste, according to information released by the Alliance and its partners. A cleanup effort in Ghana collected 300 tonnes of plastic waste, the Alliance said. Another Alliance project in the Philippines said on its website that it had recycled 21 tonnes of plastic waste.
There is no centralized source of data on plastic waste pollution in the world. But the available data suggests that even at full scale, these projects would solve only a fraction of the problem and fall far short of the Alliance’s goals of keeping millions of tons of plastic waste out of the ocean.
For example, Indonesia and India both produce more than 3 million tonnes of plastic waste per year that is neither collected nor recycled, according to the United Nations and national figures.
“AEPW’s programs are insignificant in scale and are not replicable to actually reduce the massive amount of global plastic pollution,” said Jan Dell, an independent chemical engineer, using the acronym for the Alliance.
The plastics industry has gone public about its efforts to recycle and manage plastic waste, but it spends far more on expanding production than on recycling, which has been made unprofitable by the proliferation of new, cheap plastics, reported Reuters in October.
Chevron Phillips used footage of Renew Oceans workers collecting plastic on the Ganges in a video promoting its sustainability efforts in July, even though the project ceased operations in March.
“These are some of the richest and most powerful companies on the planet, and what they have come up with are small community trash pick-up projects that provide great photo opportunities,” said John Hocevar, Director of Oceanic Campaigns for 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)
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