Anaheim, Calif. — Plastics recycling, ocean pollution and program investments were among the sustainability topics at the first Plasticity Forum in California.
While noting that the U.S. is far from ideal on plastics recycling, "California is so far ahead of other areas," said Douglas Woodring, the primary organizer of the May 9 event.
"Plastics is the most complex difficult materials to recycle" and "most of the world today does not have the ability to recover materials," resulting in a recycling rate of less than 15 percent globally.
Woodring identified a communications challenge. "Recycled content get used without anyone knowing" about the resource recovery.
Based in Hong Kong, Woodring is founder of the nonprofit Ocean Recovery Alliance, an umbrella organization encouraging environmental initiatives and developing pollution-prevention programs such as the measurement-driven Plastic Disclosure Project and the stakeholder-linking Global Alert platform.
Woodring said the disclosure project is "coming to fruition" and that The CEO Magazine picked the Global Alert as one of the top software applications in the world.