The global plastic waste problem hardly affects any other place as drastically as the world’s oceans. Dozens of organisations are meanwhile busy collecting and recycling marine plastic waste. So-called “ocean plastic” has long since arrived in the promotional products industry too. What sounds good in theory and what’s more offers wonderful material for sustainable storytelling too, turns out to be rather complicated on closer inspection – as is all too often the case when it comes down to sustainability.
In the meantime almost 400 mil. t of plastic are produced every year worldwide today and a huge amount of that ends up in the seas and oceans sooner or later. The volume of ocean waste is in the meantime estimated to be more than 150 mil. t and every year it increases by around 11 mil. t. That is as if a truckload of plastic is tipped into the sea every minute, the British Ellen MacArthur Foundation calculated and added: If we carry on the way we are, by 2050 there will be more plastic in the world’s seas than fish.
One assumes that the majority of the ocean plastic waste reaches the seas via rivers, mainly from countries that have rapid economic growth, but no adequate waste disposal systems. Whereby the waste that is carried into the sea from the Yangtze, the Indus, the Mekong, the Niger or the Nile, has not rarely been exported to these regions from Western countries, i.e. from those countries that at the same time pretend to be “recycling pioneers”.
A further leading cause of waste is fishing: The WMF estimates that 40% to 50% of the plastic waste in the oceans stems from lost nets, lines, baskets, etc. The WWF in Poland claims that up to 10,000 nets or parts of nets get lost every year in the Baltic Sea alone. According to an analysis of the environmental initiative, The Ocean Cleanup, between 75% and 86% of the plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch originates from deep-sea fishing. The huge pile of waste that was discovered between California and Hawaii in 1997 is incidentally not the only one of its kind, it is meanwhile common knowledge that it has four “relatives” in the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans.
The debate about whether plastic is a curse or a blessing, has becoming increasingly vehement for years and the pollution of the oceans has – quite rightly – become an extremely significant issue. Anyone who sees the drastic images of marine animals that have died a painful death, beautiful beaches totally filthy or children bathing in between piles of rubbish, quite often feels powerless and wishes there was something one could do.
Initiatives that dedicate themselves to the fight against plastic by fishing it out of the sea and processing it into a new raw material come along at exactly the right time here. A brief Google search reveals today that there are dozens of organisations meanwhile, some of them are private, others are NGOs, some more serious than others. Products made of “ocean plastic” have turned into a veritable market. Whether bags, T-shirts, drinking bottles or sunglasses, whether towels, skateboards or pieces of furniture – many manufacturers offer products made of processed ocean plastic and announce that this is how they want to combat the waste problem in the oceans.
Via a network of cleaning hubs, MBRC the Ocean organises clean-up campaigns on coasts and in beach regions worldwide. Together with Brands Fashion, the organisation has developed a product range.
Writing instruments, Frisbees and mini-shirts
Ocean plastic has also arrived on the haptic advertising scene – this is no wonder since it offers suppliers, distributors and above all the promoting companies the opportunity to produce more sustainable products and at the same time literally make their commitment towards environmental protection tangible.
For instance the writing instrument manufacturer Uma has since recently been offering its Recycled Pet Pen as a Pro Ocean version: “We have had very good experiences with writing instruments made from rPET,” the Executive Director, Alexander Ullmann, explained. “One doesn’t have to make any compromises compared to conventional plastic as far as the processing, the choice of PMS colours or the printability are concerned. The material is single-origin and can itself be fully recycled. Because more and more products have been made out of rPET over the past years, the demand on the global market has increased enormously and it is gradually becoming difficult to source it from closed cycles. That is why we searched for further sources and came across the theme ocean plastic or social plastic.”
Uma sources the recyclate it needs for the production of the Recycled Pet Pen Pro Ocean from Plastic Bank. The social enterprise that is based in Vancouver operates recycling centres in countries with underdeveloped waste disposal systems, where people can exchange plastic they have collected for money. Whereby Plastic Bank focuses on so-called “ocean-bound plastic”, i.e. plastic waste that is washed up onto beaches or which is found near to the sea, but which would end up in the ocean sooner or later. “Plastic Bank builds ethical recycling infrastructures within 50 kilometres of coastlines and waterways for plastic collection communities,” explained David Katz, Founder and Chairman. “Collection community members gather plastic waste and exchange the material at local collection branches for additional income and life-improving benefits, empowering them to find a path out of poverty. These include access to health, work, and life insurance, digital connectivity, and social and fintech services. Exchanges are recorded through the PlasticBank® app that enables traceable collection, secures income and verifies reporting. Collected material is reprocessed into Social Plastic® feedstock for reuse in products and packaging. As we celebrate Plastic Bank’s 10th anniversary this May,´we have stopped over 80 million kilograms of ocean-bound plastic – that corresponds to 4 billion bottles – offered additional income and life-improving benefits to over 30,000 collection community members and increased the average monthly income of Plastic Bank’s members by 33%.”
The Dutch supplier company, Clipper Interall, also cooperates with Plastic Bank and offers for example Frisbees, ice-scrapers, writing instruments, Christmas baubles or champagne coolers that are made from 100% oceanbound plastic. “Plastic Bank is one of the most professional companies in the field,” stated Brand Lead, Ruben van ‘t Loo. “The people who clean up and hand in the plastic receive money for this, which they use, among other things, for their children’s school fees. Plastic Bank’s ocean-bound plastic is 100% recycled, it contains no virgin plastic.”
The German company mbw has been working together with the Seaqual Initiative since 2021 and uses Seaqual® Yarn that is made out of ocean-bound plastic for the full-surface imprinted mini shirts and neckerchiefs which lend their cuddly toys their CI look. The Seaqual Initiative, which is based in Girona, Spain, works with different clean-up programmes on land and at sea and processes plastic waste that is found in the Mediterranean and on the coast of West Africa, into recyclate. According to own accounts, the Seaqual® Yarn sold by the initiative contains 10% ocean plastic, the remaining 90% comprises of PET from postconsumer recycling streams.
“Looking for ways to offer further sustainable products, we came across the Seaqual Initiative, which has set itself the goal of cleaning our oceans and raising people’s awareness for sustainable products,” recounted Jan Breuer, Executive Director of mbw. “We hope our contribution inspires other companies to offer more sustainable items.” According to Breuer, the Seaqual products are indeed very popular with the customers: “It is very gratifying that the feedback to our products is thoroughly positive. More and more customers have an increased awareness for sustainability so it is easy to explain the advantages of recycling materials to the customers.”
Haptic advertising media also gives the organisations themselves, who have pledged to fight ocean waste the opportunity to draw attention to their work and at the same time raise funds. For example MBRC the Ocean: Via a network of 30 own “cleaning hubs”, the Initiative organises clean-up campaigns on coasts and in beach regions worldwide, brings the collected waste to recycling centres and at the same time invests in local training measures. Together with the workwear and promotional products company Brands Fashion, MBRC the Ocean has developed a product range that is offered via the own platform as a co-branding or white label. Sven Jacobi, founder of the initiative, explained: “We donate 15% of the proceeds of all B2B sales to the non-profit foundation of MBRC. Products are thus also the means to an end. The feedback is sensational: We have an unusually low amount of returns, are selling at a profit via the platform business even without advertising and we see the trend towards sustainability with our story behind us as the main driving force of this success.”
Ullmann also considers his ocean plastic products to be a resounding success: “There is a huge demand and at the moment between 10 and 15% more enquiries than we can possibly produce. For many big companies, who have to write sustainability reports, such climate neutral give-aways with the right background offer a nice occasion for storytelling.”
The waste problem is especially visible in coastal regions of countries without adequate waste disposal systems.
Some plastic parts in the oceans travel wide distances, like this bottle with an Asian label found in the Carribean.
However, unfortunately it is not quite as fairy tale-like easy as the story is sometimes told. There are a lot of footnotes, which some brands simply forget to mention. For example, at the beginning of 2018 the group Procter & Gamble advertised a special edition of its shampoo brand Head and Shoulders using the words: “This bottle used to be plastic waste on the beach”. An advertisement that the District Court of Frankfurt later banned, because in fact the packaging was only made to 20% from plastic waste from the beach and that was without the cap.
And just recently at the end of 2022 the sports item manufacturer, Adidas, embarrassed itself after claiming that the DFB jersey for the World Championships in Qatar comprised of 50% ocean plastic. According to Adidas it originated from their long-standing partner, Parley for the Oceans. As the newspaper Die Zeit and the online magazine Flip found out, the share of recycled plastic implemented for the World Cup kit was much less – and it wasn’t sourced from Parley either.
These are just two examples of classic greenwashing, things along the same lines or similar happen on a regular basis. The offenders are not just the companies who allegedly use ocean plastic in their products, the recyclers themselves for instance are also accused of mixing new bottles under PET bottles that have allegedly been recovered from the sea in order to increase the volume of the material that they can sell as recyclate. Some experts even go as far as describing the concept “ocean plastic” in general as being “nonsense”.
The truth can’t be depicted in a few key words. As always when it comes down to sustainability: It is complicated – and in this case it begins with the question where the starting material that is used for the recycled material comes from.
Around the coast
One thing is certain and most of the companies, who market recyclate, don’t deny it either: It is hardly possible to recycle “real” ocean plastic that has perhaps been subject to salt water, mechanical stress, heat and UV radiation for years and which is soiled by mussels, algae and mud.
There are by all means practical attempts to recover nets and fishing equipment – after all these materials that are often made out of polyamide or similar combinations that satisfy the varietal purity that is in many cases absolutely necessary for recycling. A current example is the “Fishing for Litter” campaign that has been running for around a decade in the North Sea and in the Baltic Sea: The fishermen receive big collection sacks, which they not only collect the waste that gets caught in their nets in and transport it to the harbour in them, where it can be disposed of in containers, but old nets from the fishing industry can also be returned. The waste is then sorted and documented using an elaborate process to gain important information on the composition and origin of the waste and to facilitate the recycling of the material.
However, the majority of the organisations and companies focus on ocean-bound plastic for a good reason. Katz stated, “Plastic Bank operates under the global standard defined in a study by Dr. Jenna Jambeck et al. in 2015. Ocean-bound plastic is defined as plastic that has not yet found its way into the ocean but is classified as ‘mismanaged waste’ likely to end up in the ocean and is found within 50 km of a major waterway or coastal area. Based on another study by Science Advances in 2021, countries with smaller land areas, lengthier coastlines, increased rainfall, and inadequate waste management infrastructures are more prone to having their plastic waste end up in the ocean. The study also puts Indonesia, Brazil, and the Philippines among the top 10 ocean plastic contributors.“
Hence, this is a sensible approach, especially since the boundaries between ocean-bound plastic and ocean plastic are very fuzzy, as Marc Krebs, co-founder of Tide Ocean, explained: “To be honest when you are stood on a beach, you can’t say which bottles were in the sea and which were not. At the most if you look at the labels perhaps – in Mexico for instance we found bottles with labels from Jamaica, Haiti or even Honduras on one and same beach.”
Mbw clads its cuddly toys in full-surface imprintable mini shirts made with Seaqual® Yarn.
Pandinavia offers beachtowels made with recycled ocean bound plastic.
Transparency counts
However, where the recyclate comes from plays a decisive role with regards to the transparency of the collection and recycling process. After all, the companies at the end of the supply chain want to make sure that their product actually did come out of the sea.
The product range of the Swiss promotional products agency Pandinavia encompasses several items that contain ocean plastic and the company plays it safe when selecting its suppliers as Anja Zanoni, Senior Consultant & Marketing, explained: “At the moment many suppliers are offering so-called items made from ‘ocean plastic’, whereby in some cases this is a very broad term. This is why we predominantly work with suppliers that have a brand or certification.”
Plastic Bank documents the origin and supply chain of its raw materials using an app: “With our blockchain-secured platform at the heart of Plastic Bank’s operations, we are able to provide traceability to our partners,” stated Katz. “This is made possible by certified PlasticBank® app-enabled locations throughout our supply chain, from input to output. The app is used to record the details of every exchange from Plastic Bank’s registered collection members to its collection branches, all the way to the processor, who ships the materials for manufacturing. When the branch delivers the collected plastic to the processing partner, the Plastic Bank team validates the material received with the app recordings to unlock the bonus payments throughout the collection chain.“
The blockchain technology that is used for the PlasticBank® app enables seamless tracking from the beach to the finished product, as Katz continued: “Our proprietary blockchain-secured platform has a double-counting prevention system that assigns unique claim ID numbers to every transaction based on the final destination of the material. This allows us and our partners to track the movement of every piece of plastic that enters the ecosystem through the Impact Ledger, from input to output, as well as provides proof for our sustainability claims.“
The customers subsequently have the opportunity to pass this transparency on to their customers – through to the recipient of the promotional product. At Uma this happens as follows: “As standard procedure, every Recycled PET Pen Pro Ocean carries the imprint ‘made from ocean-bound plastic’ and the label ‘climate neutral’. Further information can be conveyed on outer packaging made of FSC-certified paper or via a QR code,” noted Ullmann. “After all when dealing with sustainability transparency is extremely important – everything has to have rhyme and reason and be correspondingly transparent.”
Uma sources the recyclate it needs for the production of the Recycled Pet Pen Pro Ocean from Plastic Bank.
Clipper Interall’s range of ocean bound plastic products includes among other things champagne coolers.
Waste is turned into something valuable
Before a customer can hold his finished product, which contains the DNA from plastic recovered from the sea in his hand, it first has to be processed – a challenge as Jacobi explained: “The different types of plastic that are collected from the ocean have to be sorted to make sure that only plastic with similar characteristics are combined in a recycling process. Due to their high degree of purity, PET bottles are wellsuitable for recycling for instance. The quality of the recycled material can be impaired since ocean plastic is often damaged and worn. Depending on the type of plastic there may a e limitations in the production or colour deviations.” Krebs added: “Not everything can be recycled. For example, we looked at flip-flops and realised that in ten pairs ten different types of plastic were used.”
“The material collected is frequently contaminated and cannot be used for a high-quality finished product. Hence special techniques and cleaning processes are of the greatest importance,” commented Breuer. “Material-related restrictions may occur during the production or customisation of Seaqual® Yarn, which are caused by its special state. It is possible that it is more brittle and more difficult to process compared to conventional materials.”
So, customers have to accept certain restrictions. Ullmann: “Social plastic is dirtier than classic rPET, which is why the choice of colours is limited and for this reason we initially decided to offer the Recycled PET Pen Pro Ocean in six standard shades including among others light blue, light green and sand. These are not necessarily the classic advertising colours, but they do reflect the classic summer and ocean colours. But the customers from the promoting industry, from banks to car brands, forgo a CI-compatible design in favour of the story.”
And they should be prepared to pay the higher price that is inevitable due to the sourcing and further processing of the ocean plastic and which according to Jacobi comprises of several factors: “Extracting the raw material is much more expensive and time-consuming than for conventional plastic. Furthermore, the logistics also pushes the prices up because the infrastructure is more or less non-existent as well as the huge share of plastic that is collected but which cannot be reused, which lies at up to 50%. This means that some of the recycled plastic recovered from coastal regions costs up to three times more than conventional recyclates.”
The focal point for the marketing of ocean recyclates thus lies on companies that are aware that the plastic problem is also a social problem and that they are not just paying for a raw material – Katz: “Our focus is to partner with global manufacturers, who understand that stopping ocean plastic requires a social impact as plastic and poverty are intertwined.”
Where is the journey headed?
Is the raw material from the sea going to become a trend in the haptic advertising sector? Zanoni is a little sceptical: “The feedback is very good, however many projects fail because of the high minimum quantities, high prices – depending on the supplier and the product ocean plastic is between 10% and 100% more expensive – or because of restrictions with the implementation. The more suppliers and products there are, the more will be possible, because at the moment the range of products is still very small. But mid and long-term we see a lot of potential in really sustainable materials or the cradle-to-cradle process for our industry.”
A fisherman has collected plastic waste in the nature reserve of Koh Surin and brings it to a sorting centre operated by Tide Ocean.
Employees sort and separate the plastic waste for further processing. This creates jobs.
Hence, one should start at the beginning and not at the end of the global plastic problem, because it is above all a disposal problem. Improved reusable systems, recycling that works, smarter products that can be single-origin sorted at the end of their cycle as well as above all the creation of a disposal infrastructure in countries that haven’t got one, are some of the most important points that have to be addressed. “Plastic is not going anywhere. There will never be a world without plastic. If humanity is to exist in another 500 years, it would be in part because of the material,” stated Katz. “Plastic is not the problem – it is the way we approach it. It is the mismanaged plastic waste that finds its way into our waterways and eventually the ocean. What we must do is bring forth a renaissance where we give new life to old plastic instead of creating anew.“
That is why brands have to ask themselves where to begin with their storytelling. Global players that contribute significantly to the pollution of the oceans through their production and distribution methods should perhaps think about reducing packaging or designing their products so that they can be sorted into singleorigin materials, rather than doing PR work for themselves with a dubiously implemented “ocean plastic special edition”.
Those on the other hand who manufacture, import or use promotional products for their campaign, can get a special message across using transparent, trackable ocean plastics, but they should first of all always ask themselves about the usage and purpose of a product. Otherwise, at the end of the day, ocean plastic or not, they have only produced new waste. Waste that contributes towards huge amounts of plastic growing in the ocean – at a much faster rate than we can fish it back out again.
// Till Barth
photos: Clipper Interall (1); Brands Fashion/MBRC the Ocean (1); mbw (1); Pandinavia (1); Tide Ocean (4); uma (1)
