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By Joe Brock, John Geddie and Saurabh Sharma
SINGAPORE/VARANASI, India, Jan 18 (Reuters) - A wheelbarrow
and a handful of metal grids for capturing litter, emblazoned
with the words “Renew Oceans,” sit rusting outside an empty,
padlocked office in the Indian city of Varanasi, a short walk
from the Ganges.
It is all that is left of a programme, funded by some of the
world's biggest oil and chemical companies, that they said could
solve a runaway ocean plastic waste crisis which is killing
marine life - from plankton to whales - and clogging tropical
beaches and coral reefs.
The closure of Renew Oceans, which has not previously been
reported, is a sign that an industry whose financial future is
tied to the growth of plastic production is falling short of its
targets to curb the resulting increase in waste, according to
two environmental groups.
The Alliance to End Plastic Waste, a Singapore-based
nonprofit group set up two years ago by big oil and chemical
companies, said on its website in November 2019 that its
partnership with Renew Oceans would be expanded to the world's
most-polluted rivers and “ultimately could stop the flow of
plastic into the planet's ocean.”
Exxon Mobil Corp XOM.N , Royal Dutch Shell Plc RDSa.L ,
Dow Inc DOW.N , Chevron Phillips Chemical Co and about 50 other
companies committed to spend $1.5 billion over five years on the
Alliance and its projects. The Alliance has not said publicly
how much money it has raised from its members or what it has
spent overall.
The Alliance confirmed to Reuters that Renew Oceans had
stopped operating, partly due to the new coronavirus, which had
halted some work.
“Without any foreseeable time frame for restarting, combined
with other implementation challenges, the Alliance and Renew
Oceans jointly decided to a mutual termination agreement in
October 2020,” Alliance spokeswoman Jessica Lee told Reuters.
Anne Rosenthal, counsel at U.S. law firm Hurwit &
Associates, representing Renew Oceans, also said it expects the
project to fold. “While it has made important 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 this problem deserves,” she said.
The Alliance, with a staff of about 50, mostly based in
Singapore, has other projects in the pipeline, but they are
small, community-based endeavours or have not yet come to
fruition. “It is important to note that the full impact of
projects will be realised when their operations are at full
scale,” said Lee.
Renew Oceans published targets on its website to collect 45
tonnes of plastic trash from the Ganges in 2019 and 450 tonnes
in 2020. Neither the Alliance nor Renew Oceans has published any
information on their progress in reaching those targets. Four
people involved in the project told Reuters it collected less
than one 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 comment on the amount
of waste the project collected. Scientists estimate more than
half a million tonnes of plastic trash enters the Ganges every
year. There is no government data on how much of that is
collected.
‘ONE OF THE BEST PROJECTS'
At the launch event for the Alliance in January 2019,
live-streamed by National Geographic, Dow Chief Executive Jim
Fitterling said Renew Oceans was “one of the best projects we've
got.”
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 take in plastic
litter and give out vouchers for money off taxi rides and
groceries, and pyrolysis devices to turn plastic trash into
diesel.
Prototypes of those devices were deployed in Varanasi but
regularly malfunctioned, the four people involved in the project
told Reuters. The Alliance and Renew Oceans declined comment on
the performance of the technology.
Renew Oceans has not expanded operations beyond the pilot
project in Varanasi, the Alliance said, in response to Reuters'
questions. Renew Oceans declined comment.
The Alliance said it invested $5 million in Renew Oceans
over a two-year period. It said some of that had been returned
to the Alliance and more was expected to be returned once Renew
Oceans wound down its 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 “to divert millions of tons of
plastic waste in more than 100 at-risk cities across the globe”
over five years. So far the group has announced more than a
dozen programmes, including Renew Oceans, but is 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 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 it had recycled 21 tonnes of
plastic waste.
There is no centralized source for data on plastic waste
pollution across the globe. But the data that is available
suggests that even at full scale, those projects would only
address a fraction of the problem and still fall well short of
the Alliance's own targets of keeping millions of tonnes of
plastic garbage out of the ocean.
For instance, Indonesia and India both produce more than 3
million tonnes of plastic waste a year that is not collected or
recycled, according to United Nations and national figures.
“AEPW's programs are trivial in scale and not replicable 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 been publicising its efforts to
recycle and manage plastic waste, but it is spending vastly more
on expanding production than recycling, which has been rendered
uneconomic by the proliferation of cheap new plastic, Reuters
reported 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 had
stopped operations in March.
“These are some of the richest and most powerful companies
on the planet, and what they've come up with are some small,
community litter picking projects that make for nice photo
opportunities,” said John Hocevar, Ocean Campaigns Director,
Greenpeace USA. “There is no way to reduce plastic waste without
reducing plastic production.”
Chevron Phillips did not respond to a request for comment.