The Southeast Asia chapter of Prevented Ocean Plastic has inaugurated a new collection centre in Kelapa Gading, North Jakarta. The new site has a processing capacity of up to 110 tons of plastic waste per month and will employ around 30 people.
The Prevented Ocean Plastic programme is a global recycling initiative which sees discarded plastic bottles being picked up by plastic collectors from areas at risk of ocean plastic pollution, who take them to local collection centres for payment. At these centres, the bottles are sorted and pressed for transport to plastic recycling factories, where the plastic is washed, sanitised, and processed into raw material flakes or pellets, all according to European and North American quality standards.
The facility in North Jakarta was financed by Singapore-based investment management firm Circulate Capital. “We have been addressing the problem of ocean plastic pollution for a long time,” said Daniel Lawrence, director of the Southeast Asia chapter of Prevented Ocean Plastics. “Our continued partnership with Circulate Capital allows us to scale that further by building more collection centres in the areas that need it. As a result of their investment, we have been able to expand our areas of coverage, provide more income opportunities for collectors, and increase the amount of recycled material available for businesses to bring into their supply chain.”
To date, the Prevented Ocean Plastic programme has diverted almost two billion bottles from reaching the ocean. It has grown into an award-winning initiative that works in partnership with global brands ranging from Lidl to Patagonia. The project collaborates with several plastics manufacturing partners including Groupe Guillin, Spectra Packaging, and Berry Global.
This June, Bantam Materials UK, the supplier of Prevented Ocean Plastic in Europe, announced plans to open 25 new plastic waste collection centres around the world by 2025. The centres will be opened in regions that have historically lacked recycling infrastructure to deal with their plastic waste, including Southeast Asia, South America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Mediterranean. Twenty centres will be high-capacity collection centres capable of processing 100 tonnes of discarded plastic waste per month, and five will be bigger ‘aggregation centres’ able to process up to 500 tonnes per month. By 2025, Prevented Ocean Plastic expects to be collecting 54,000 tonnes of plastic waste per year across the 25 new centres.