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March 16, 2020 03:40 PM

USAID seeks industry help on $48M ocean plastics program

Steve Toloken
Assistant Managing Editor
Plastics News Staff
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    U.S. Agency for International Development
    The U.S. Agency for International Development is looking for industry input on a $48 million initiative to reduce plastic pollution in the developing world.

    Nashville, Tenn. — A $48 million U.S. government effort to fight plastic marine pollution in the developing world is looking for help from the industry.

    The "Clean Cities, Blue Ocean" program was launched in mid-2019 by the U.S. Agency for International Development to mitigate ocean plastics and boost waste management in developing nations.

    Now, it's opening the door to the plastics industry as it starts its five-year program, beginning with Asia and Latin America, a USAID official said at a presentation at the recent Plastics Recycling Conference and Trade Show in Nashville.

    "Why I'm here today is we have a big ask to you because there's so much knowledge in this room," said Clare Romanik, a senior urban specialist and ocean plastics specialist at the agency, in her Feb. 18 speech.

    "What USAID is bringing to the table, our competitive advantage, is understanding the developing world, working for decades with cities and improving their municipal services."

    But the agency wants to hear from the plastics supply chain because it believes the work it's doing on local waste management can help with a specific business goal — collecting materials to meet recycled content commitments made by major brand consumer product companies, she said.

    "We know the brands and retailers have made lots of public commitments and we think we can help implement some of that by helping them with the take back and increasingly making sure they get good recycled content," she said.

    She specifically said they are interested in working with packaging designers and converters, technology and service providers, as well as manufacturers, waste haulers and recyclers.

    "We really want to cooperate with you to find what solutions you might bring that we can help you apply in these places," Romanik told the industry audience.

    It's not the agency's only work around plastics pollution. Last summer USAID announced it was contributing $35 million toward loan guarantees in partnership with the industry-funded social investment firm Circulate Capital.

    She said initiatives like the "Clean Cities, Blue Ocean" effort are needed because local governments in developing countries struggle to find money for waste management, even as they urbanize rapidly, adopt lifestyles that use much more packaging, and risk further strains on their environment.

    "Between 2010 and 2050, there will be an additional 2.5 billion people living in towns and cities in the world," Romanik said. "The whole world is rapidly urbanizing but 90 percent of those urban people will be in Asia and Africa. So we really need to focus on that challenge."

    Plastics waste is a complex problem, she said, that requires a lot of things, including social and behavioral change for people, business and public institutions.

    "We are tackling this problem of ocean plastics pollution because it is a global development challenge," she said, adding that USAID sees CCBO as helping to scale up efforts that work and share those practices.

    Some places may need to strengthen rules against open dumping, for example, but a common thread is lack of government resources, she said. Even in places where national governments have plans of action around marine plastic, like Indonesia, cities often lack funding to implement them, the agency said in materials describing its program.

    U.S. Agency for International Development
    The U.S. government's $48 million "Clean Cities, Blue Ocean" program to target plastic pollution is starting with countries in Asia and Latin America.

    "We recognize very much that it's local governments that are really strapped," Romanik said. "There really are not the financial resources, not the tax base, to draw on for programs of waste collection, much less recycling. There's really a lack of capacity as well as governance."

    She said the programs need to develop sustainable ways to pay for themselves.

    "It's so critical to put in place systems for continuing funding, not just financing infrastructure investment, but making sure there will be funding streams to pay off the matrix infrastructure that needs to be in place outside of the project," Romanik said.

    She said the agency wants partnerships with the private sector, as well working with traditionally underrepresented groups, like women, young people and the "informal waste collectors" who try to gather valuables from trash.

    CCBO builds on a municipal waste recycling program USAID started in 2016 in Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Sri Lanka, the locations named among the top five emitters of ocean plastics. But the project will be expanding the footprint under CCBO.

    USAID said the 2018 Save Our Seas Act encourages federal agencies to work with countries that discharge the largest amounts of solid waste into the oceans.

    Asia is "an epicenter of this issue of ocean plastics pollution" but the need is global, she said.

    "With the Clean Cities, Blue Ocean program, we will be expanding to a few other countries in Asia as well as starting to work in Latin America and the Caribbean region," she said. "Every country I go to, and I've worked in 35 countries, every country needs this kind of work."

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