Ocean Plastic Cleanup Pledge

When you buy a Packie bag, we’ll remove 80 bottles’ worth of ocean-bound plastic (2.2lb) from polluted rivers and shores in Southeast Asia and Africa. This plastic collection gives crucial income to local waste pickers that live in disadvantaged communities. The collection is facilitated and tracked by Verdn, and executed by Empower AS. You are able to track your own unique impact after buying the product.

You will receive an email with a link to your personal impact dashboard for you where you can see the status, and track the progress, of your ocean-bound plastic cleanup. 2.2lb is equal to 80 plastic bottles, and each purchase makes a difference for our planet, and the waste pickers that get paid to clean it up.

By making this purchase you can make a difference today.

The scale and scope of the plastic problem

More than 350 million tonnes of plastic is produced every year – half of which is intended for single use, and less than 10% of which is ever recycled. From this astronomic total, only about 2.3% ends up in the oceans, yet this still means that 8 million tonnes of waste are added every year; the equivalent of a garbage truck dumped every minute. The number is also growing rapidly, and it is estimated that plastic may outweigh fish in the ocean by 2050.

The easiest way to tackle ocean plastic

Our best chance against ocean plastic is to tackle it at source: as much as one quarter of all ocean plastic — 2 million tonnes a year — originates from just 10 rivers. Eight of these are in Southeast Asia, the last two in Africa. In this lies a huge opportunity. Not only do these 10 rivers make it possible to organise cost-effective plastic cleanup operations, but with the right business model, this cleanup can simultaneously provide high wages to hard-working, disadvantaged locals. The very same locals who have been shortchanged by globalisation, with no realistic capacity to caretake the environment given their current socio-economic conditions.