Big Oil’s flagship plastic waste project sinks in the Ganges

SINGAPORE / VARANASI, India (Reuters) – A wheelbarrow and a handful of metal scraps to capture rubbish, emblazoned with the words “Renew Oceans”, are rusted outside an empty, padlocked office in the Indian city of Varanasi, walking distance to Ganges.

That’s all that’s left of a program, funded by some of the world’s largest chemical and oil companies, that said it could solve a crisis leaking ocean plastic waste that is killing marine life (from plankton to whales) and obstructing tropical beaches and coral. reefs.

According to two environmental groups, the closure of Renew Oceans, which had not been reported earlier, is a sign that an industry whose financial future is tied to the growth of plastic production is below its targets to curb the increase resulting from waste.

The Alliance for the End of Plastic Waste, a Singapore-based nonprofit group set up two years ago by major oil and chemical companies, said on its website in November 2019 that its partnership with Renew Oceans s ‘would extend to the world’s most polluted rivers and’ ultimately could stop the flow of plastic into the planet’s ocean. ‘

Exxon Mobil Corp., Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Dow Inc., Chevron Phillips Chemical Co. and about 50 other companies pledged to spend $ 1.5 billion in 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 in general.

The Alliance confirmed to Reuters that Renew Oceans had stopped operating, in part because of the new coronavirus, which had stopped some work.

“With no foreseeable period of time to restart, combined with other implementation challenges, the Alliance and Renew Oceans jointly decided on a mutual termination agreement in October 2020,” the Alliance spokeswoman told Reuters. , Jessica Lee.

Anne Rosenthal, a lawyer for the US law firm Hurwit & Associates, representing Renew Oceans, also said she expects the project to fold. “While 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 this problem deserves,” he said.

The Alliance, with a staff of about 50 people, mostly based in Singapore, has other projects underway, but they are small community initiatives or have not yet come to fruition. “It’s important to keep in mind that the full impact of projects will be realized when their operations are on a large scale,” Lee said.

Renew Oceans posted 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. targets. Four people involved in the project told Reuters that it collected less than a tonne of waste from the Ganges before it closed in March last year after less than six months in operation.

The Alliance and Renew Oceans declined comments on the amount of waste collected by the project. Scientists estimate that more than half a million tonnes of plastic waste enters 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 was “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 collect plastic garbage and hand out vouchers for taxi and supermarket purchases and pyrolysis devices. convert plastic waste into diesel.

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 has not expanded operations beyond the Varanasi pilot project, 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. It was said that some of the things had been returned to the Alliance and that they were expected to return once more Renew Oceans finished their operations.

Exxon and Shell directed Reuters questions to the Alliance. Dow and Chevron Phillips did not respond to requests for comment.

The Alliance set a goal of “diverting millions of tons of plastic waste to more than 100 cities at risk around the world” for five years. So far, the group has announced more than a dozen programs, including Renew Oceans, but it is well below that goal.

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 clean-up effort in Ghana has collected 300 tonnes 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 are no centralized sources of data on plastic waste pollution worldwide. But the available data suggest that, even on a large scale, these projects would only address a fraction of the problem and would still fall far short of the Alliance’s own goals of keeping millions of tons of plastic garbage out of the ocean.

For example, Indonesia and India produce more than 3 million tonnes of plastic waste a year that is not collected or recycled, according to United Nations and national data.

“AEPW programs have a trivial scale and cannot be replicated to make a real reduction in the massive amount of global plastic pollution,” Jan Dell, an independent chemical engineer, said with the Alliance’s acronym.

The plastics industry has been publicizing its efforts to recycle and manage plastic waste, but is investing much more in expanding production than in recycling, which has become uneconomical due to the proliferation of new and cheap plastic. , as reported by Reuters in October.

Chevron Phillips used images of Renew Oceans workers collecting plastic in the Ganges in a video promoting their sustainability efforts in July, even though the project had stopped operations in March.

“These are some of the richest and most powerful companies on the planet, and what has arrived are some small community garbage collection projects that offer good photo 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 any requests for comment.