These days, you can buy sunglasses, running shoes, swim trunks and even surfboard fins made from recycled plastic and fishing nets that otherwise would end up in the ocean. Now Dell, General Motors and other corporations are launching an initiative to bring industrial scale to artisanal efforts to tackle the ocean plastic pollution crisis by building a supply chain to intercept plastic trash and turn it into everything from packaging and furniture to bicycle parts.
"The broad impact is how companies are coalescing around issues they care about, in this case environmental issues, and how you can start to hyper-scale these types of solutions," said Oliver Campbell, Dell’s director of worldwide procurement and packaging. "Dell’s plastic use is literally a drop in the ocean, but by working together, we change some of the dynamics around the use of plastics. I can see this template being used in other environmental arenas as well."
The consortium, NextWave, initially will obtain recycled materials in Indonesia, one of five Asian countries identified in an Ocean Conservancy report as the source of more than half of the 8 million metric tons of the plastic that flows into the ocean each year. The report cited a lack of recycling infrastructure in Indonesia, China, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam for the countries’ outsize role in ocean plastic pollution.
"We’re taking mismanaged waste and turning it into managed waste — trash on the ground that nobody cares about or has no end buyer, so it just ends up getting washed into the ocean during a big storm," said Dune Ives, executive director of the Lonely Whale, the ocean-focused nonprofit co-founded by actor and environmental activist Adrian Grenier.
Grenier serves as Dell’s "social good advocate" and had urged the computer giant to take on ocean issues, Ives and Campbell said. (The company’s first foray into marine recycling was a laptop-packaging tray made from 25 percent ocean-bound plastic collected in Haiti.)
Lonely Whale serves as convener of the NextWave consortium, announced Tuesday. It also includes furniture maker Herman Miller, carpet manufacturer Interface, Trek Bicycle, design and manufacturing firm Humanscale and Bureo, which recycles fishing line into skateboard decks, sunglasses and other products.
The companies have pledged to test the use of ocean-bound plastics in their products and reduce consumption of virgin plastics in their operations and supply chains. (Dell provided the startup funding for NextWave and the companies pay membership fees and make other monetary and in-kind donations.) United Nations Environment, the 5 Gyres Institute, the Zoological Society of London and the New Materials Institute are also participating in the consortium.