The AEPW will make investments and drive progress in four key areas: 1) Infrastructure development to collect and manage waste and increase recycling; 2) Innovation to advance and scale new technologies that make recycling and recovering plastics easier and create value from all post-use plastics; 3) Education and engagement of governments, businesses, and communities to mobilize action; and, 4) Clean up concentrated areas of plastic waste already in the environment, particularly the major conduits of waste, like rivers, that carry land-based plastic waste to the ocean.
One founding member, Dow, has a leading role in the AEPW and the company's actions, commitments and investments are aimed to help eliminate plastic waste from the environment. Most recently the company has invested in people and companies working toward solutions: In October, Dow announced that it became a founding investor in Circulate Capital’s $100 million effort to incubate and finance companies and infrastructure that prevent waste in oceans. Circulate Capital’s mission is to demonstrate the viability of investment in the waste management and recycling sectors to attract the institutional investment capital needed to scale integrated recycling and waste management companies and infrastructure across South and Southeast Asia.
Also, Dow is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Plastic Action Partnership, designed to bring businesses, civil society, national and local governments, community groups and world-class experts together to collaborate on solving plastic pollution. This partnership is initially funded by the governments of Canada and the U.K., along with Dow and several global brands, with the objective to have investable localized solutions in place by 2020, which can then be adapted and implemented in other countries. The first project is a collaboration with the government of Indonesia.
Dow’s recent #PullingOurWeight campaign, which began in fall 2018, included more than 5,600 Dow employees, families and friends participating in 55 cleanups globally, removing more than 52,500 pounds of trash and litter from beaches and waterways. Last but not the least, Dow's product innovation is another key part of Dow’s efforts to end plastics waste in the environment. Dow’s RecycleReady technology enables manufacturers to develop packaging that can qualify for the Sustainable Packaging Coalition’s “How2Recycle” label and can be recycled via polyethylene recycling streams such as the grocery store drop-off system in the U.S.
Dow also continues to focus on compatabilizer technologies which allow multi-layer packaging materials to be recycled into new products. In 2014, it initiated the Hefty® EnergyBag® recovery initiative which collects hard-to-recycle plastics and converts them into valuable resources. As of July 2018, the Hefty® EnergyBag® program has collected more than 176,500 bags and diverted more than 115 tons of plastics from landfills, the equivalent of approximately 92 million snack-sized chip bags or 546 barrels of diesel fuel. Dow recently announced another $100,000 in grant funding for organizations to establish programs in their communities. Read more...Dow co-founds alliance against plastic waste
