We are proud to announce the launch of our support of the Harvest Plastic Lombok project in Indonesia in partnership with the Ocean Recovery Alliance. The objective of this project is to work with villages in Lombok to reimagine how plastic is disposed of and work to develop a circular economy for plastic.
According to the United Nations Environment Programme, “with a population of 250 million, Indonesia is the fourth most populous country and second-largest plastic polluter in the world after China. The country produces 3.2 million tonnes of unmanaged plastic waste a year, of which about 1.29 million tonnes ends up in the sea.”
Waste management services across Indonesia are limited and plastic ends up discarded on the ground or being burned. Both of these outcomes are bad for human well-being and the environment. When plastic is burned, toxic gasses are released and can lead to significant negative health outcomes. Plastic that is discarded on the ground enters watersheds through streams, creeks, and rivers and eventually ends up in the ocean, harming marine life. Current estimates are that less than 10% of plastic in Lombok is properly managed.
Our solution set is to align technology, education, community engagement, and circular economy supply chains to provide an end-to-end solution for plastic.
Our technology solution is the Ocean Recovery Alliance’s Global Alert app which allows users to report plastic “hotspots” which need community action to address.
Our education solution includes working with key stakeholders to use the Global Alert app to track
plastic hotspots, share resources for how plastic can be properly disposed of, and organizing community members to join the “Harvest Plastic” competition. Community engagement through the Harvest Plastic initiative is a model that the Ocean Recovery Alliance pioneered in Cambodia.
Community members utilize repurposed rice bags to collect plastic from their households, which our team can aggregate and bring to “plastic banks”. We also work with them to address plastic hot spots by installing booms and other technology which can help streamline the process of collecting plastic and removing it from the environment.
A true circular economy for plastic is linked through the plastic banks which then process (segregate, wash, and chop up) the plastic for use in new products. These plastic banks already exist, but struggle with aggregating plastic from households.
As we work with community members in Lombok, we are integrating 10 Billion Strong's environmental leadership training in our engagement strategies. In particular, we are emphasizing rare.org's behavior change levers and a focus on developing individual leadership capacity to drive community change.
The Ocean Recovery Alliance is the main grantee for this project. The project is supported by the Asia Venture Philanthropy Network’s (AVPN) APAC Sustainability Seed Fund. The seed fund is
designed to, "support the most innovative tech-driven solutions to combat climate change and drive sustainability in Asia Pacific." Additional support for the project comes from Google.org and the Asian Development Bank.