SINGAPORE / VARANASI, India (Reuters) – A wheelbarrow and a handful of metal grids to capture trash, with the words “Renovate Oceans”, rust outside an empty, padlocked office in the Indian city of Varanasi , a short walk from the Ganges.
It’s all that’s left of a program, funded by some of the world’s largest oil and chemical companies, that they said could solve an ocean plastic waste crisis that is killing marine life – from plankton to whales – and obstructing tropical beaches and coral reefs.
The closure of Renew Oceans, which was not previously reported, is a sign that an industry whose financial future is tied to the growth of plastic production is falling short of its goals of containing the resulting increase in waste, according to two environmental groups.
The Alliance to End Plastic Waste, a Singapore-based nonprofit group created two years ago by major oil and chemicals companies, said on its website in November 2019 that its partnership with Renew Oceans would be expanded to more rivers polluted waters of the world and “could ultimately interrupt the flow of plastic in the planet’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 Alliance and its projects. The Alliance did not publicly say how much money it raised from its members or how much it spent in total.
The Alliance confirmed to Reuters that Renew Oceans had stopped working, in part because of the new coronavirus, which halted some work.
“Without any predictable timeframe for the restart, combined with other implementation challenges, Alliance and Renew Oceans jointly decided on a mutual termination agreement in October 2020,” Alliance spokeswoman Jessica Lee told Reuters.
Anne Rosenthal, a lawyer at the United States law firm Hurwit & Associates, representing Renew Oceans, also said she hopes the project will be closed. “Although it has made important progress in addressing 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,” she said.
The Alliance, with a team of around 50 people, most of whom are based in Singapore, has other projects in progress, but they are small and community projects 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 posted targets on its website to collect 45 tonnes of plastic waste from the Ganges in 2019 and 450 tonnes in 2020. Neither Alliance nor Renew Oceans has published any information on progress in reaching these targets. Four people involved in the project told Reuters that it collected less than a ton of garbage from the Ganges before it was closed in March last year, after less than six months in operation.
Alliance and Renew Oceans declined to comment on the amount of waste the project collected. Scientists estimate that more than half a million tonnes of plastic waste enter the Ganges each year. There is no government data on how much of this is collected.
‘ONE OF THE BEST PROJECTS’
At the Alliance launch event in January 2019, broadcast live by National Geographic, Dow Chief Executive Jim Fitterling said Renew Oceans was “one of the best projects we have”.
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 cash vouchers for taxi rides and groceries and pyrolysis devices to transform diesel plastic waste.
Prototypes of these devices have been deployed in Varanasi, but regularly malfunction, the four people involved in the project told Reuters. Alliance and Renew Oceans declined to comment on the technology’s performance.
Renew Oceans has not expanded 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 that some of this material has been returned to the Alliance and more should be returned once Renew Oceans is finished.
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 “diverting millions of tons of plastic waste in more than 100 at-risk cities worldwide” over five years. So far, the group has announced more than a dozen programs, including Renew Oceans, but it falls far short of that 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 cleaning effort in Ghana 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 centralized source of data on pollution from plastic waste worldwide. But the available data suggests that, even at full scale, these projects would solve only a fraction of the problem and still fall well short of the Alliance’s own goals of keeping millions of tons of plastic waste out of the ocean.
For example, Indonesia and India produce more than 3 million tons of plastic waste per year that are not collected or recycled, according to the United Nations and national data.
“AEPW’s programs are trivial in scale and cannot be replicated to make a real reduction in the enormous amount of global plastic pollution,” said Jan Dell, an independent chemical engineer, using the Alliance’s acronym.
The plastics industry has publicized its efforts to recycle and manage plastic waste, but is spending far more on expanding production than on recycling, which has become uneconomical due to the proliferation of new cheap plastics, Reuters reported in October.
Chevron Phillips used images of Renew Oceans workers collecting plastic in the Ganges in a video promoting their sustainability efforts in July, although the project stopped operations in March.
“These are some of the richest and most powerful companies on the planet, and what they have created are some small community waste collection projects that offer great photo opportunities,” said John Hocevar, Director of Ocean Campaigns at 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