The Alliance to End Plastic Waste (AEPW) has published its 2023 progress report.
The Singapore-based industry Alliance said it reduced 79,801 tonnes of unmanaged plastic waste in 2023, bringing its cumulative impact to 118,580 tonnes since it started operations in 2019.
The AEPW also valorised 89,132 tonnes of plastic in 2023, mainly through recycling, and a total of 128,240 tonnes since 2019.
The Alliance also added 61,200 tonnes to its total potential forecasted collection capacity through Project ParikraM in India. The Alliance funds Materials Recovery Facilities (MRF) across Indian cities through the project. It is also supporting a digital ecosystem that connects waste collectors to waste buyers, and ensures waste is traceable from source to recovery.
In 2023, AEPW worked with 904 organisations and its projects created over 480 new jobs. Almost 8,000 informal waste workers benefitted from either improved income, working conditions, or social benefits.
“Impressive though these numbers are, the magnitude of the global plastic waste challenge is such that they are only ever part of the story,” said Jacob Duer, AEPW’s President and CEO. “The Alliance is in a unique position to create lasting impact that goes beyond the direct output of our own projects and our funding. We have the knowledge and expertise to develop and test new business models and technologies to unlock solutions that would otherwise be impossible. With continued global focus on solutions to the plastic waste challenge, the Alliance’s work to advance circularity has accelerated, with strong progress achieved on developing, de-risking, and communication of solutions that can be scaled.”
Duer added that the Alliance’s Solution Models have been key to its effort to advance circularity. In March, the association published the first of a series of ‘playbooks’ describing solution models for a circular economy for plastics.
The first playbook covers household waste segregation and maps the steps Alliance project partners have taken to encourage households to separate plastic waste ‘at source’, in projects implemented in Argentina, China, and Indonesia.
The second playbook covers basic manual sorting of municipal waste and what can be done to improve it. Four success stories from projects in Brazil (Recicleiros), Indonesia (Project Stop – Jembrana), China (Lovere), and Kenya (Taka Taka) exemplify the pain points addressed, lessons learn, and critical success factors.
The Alliance said 2024 will be a ‘crucial year’ for advancing solutions to tackle global plastic pollution, highlighting the end of negotiations for the UN plastics treaty in November.
“We see our role as one focused on implementation, and working quickly to convert the agreement into on-the-ground progress that tackles plastic waste,” the report reads.
The AEPW previously been criticised for slow progress in its efforts to tackle plastic pollution. In 2022, a report from the environmental think tank Planet Tracker accused the Alliance of greenwashing amid reports it had only recycled 4,000 tonnes of plastic waste since 2019.
The alliance strongly disputed the conclusions in the report, saying that investments like it is making in developing countries will take time to show results.
Those results are now on show, as the Alliance’s reduction of unmanaged waste jumped over 200% between 2022 and 2023. The amount of plastic waste the Alliance captured value from, mostly through recycling, increased by 227%.
The Alliance to End Plastic Waste was founded in 2019 by industry members, including BASF, Chevron Phillips Chemical, ExxonMobil, Dow Chemical, Mitsubishi Chemical Holdings, Procter & Gamble and Shell.