When Plastic Credits Really Work
What is a Plastic Credit?
Plastic Credits are just like Carbon Credits. They are sold to a company that wants to be Plastic Neutral and is unable to completely reduce their plastic usage to zero. A company buys a volume Plastic Credits in kilograms equal to the kilograms of their plastic footprint and that money funds a project that recycles a volume waste plastic equivalent to the companies plastic footprint, thus making them Plastic Neutral.
Why not just stop using plastic?
The frustrating thing about plastic is that it is actually a very versatile material that makes useful products with many valuable benefits. For example, it keeps food fresher longer, and makes strong low cost products. So completely eliminating plastic is unlikely to happen.
What does need to happen is reducing unnecessary plastic use, especially single use plastic and harmful or unrecyclable plastics, and ensuring that all plastic products are recyclable and actually recycled.
Plastic Credits are a pragmatic and market driven solution that encourages this to happen.
How can Plastic Credits work for your company?
Today, the demand for products and services that are sold with sustainability in mind is rapidly on the increase. For certain sectors, such as fast moving consumer goods (FMCG), especially cosmetics or food, strong sustainability credentials are a must have. Those with strong sustainability credentials have a substantial opportunity to take market share from their unsustainable competitors.
In the FMCG space, plastic strategies increasingly dominate the sustainability toolkit. However, sustainable plastic strategies are not always easy to implement due to various reasons, such as tight industry margins, long term investments in packaging equipment, practicality of non-plastic alternatives, just to name a few.
It is these scenarios where Plastic Credits can play a decisive role in FMCG sustainability strategies, by essentially being the “strategy of last resort”
Going down a Plastic Credit route for your FMCG brand can have some spectacular co-benefits, ie. the social narrative that you acquire in addition to being Certified as Plastic Neutral. This social narrative varies depending upon project selection, but the co-benefits typically relate to doing good for a community, such as enhancing their prosperity and health, education and learning, employment and profit, plus more.
How can Plastic Collective help your company?
At Plastic Collective we work with remote, small, Indigenous and vulnerable communities to establish plastic recycling projects, where the social and environmental impact is profound.
To do this we establish plastic recycling micro-enterprises that use our proprietary Shruder recycling technologies, which empower communities to address the plastic waste epidemic, clean their environment and oceans, stop plastic going into landfill or being burnt, improve health and education, all whilst generating local employment and profit for the benefit of that community.
This makes our projects rich in co-benefits, all of which can be packaged with Plastic Credits purchased from Plastic Collective. If you want to know more about how Plastic Credits work for your company, please email programs@plasticcollective.co.
