Ep. 344: How can we stop one billion bottles?
Guest: David Katz, CEO/Founder of Plastic Bank
Plastic, plastic, plastic – it is everywhere.
It is woven into the fabric of the human experience in every country in the world. Plastic delivers water to your tap; it takes that same water away after it exits your sink. Plastic is wrapped around the wires in your home and it has reduced the likelihood of fire inside your home dramatically.
You can’t live without the stuff. In most cases, plastic is the better environmental choice. The life cycle assessment of plastic over glass for bottles tips in favour of plastic by a long shot. That is, until that flimsy plastic bottle that is filled with a beverage gets tossed aside with no regard to where it will end up. The same is true of plastic over paper straws.
Not to be high and mighty about it, but plastic bottles in most advanced countries do not end up in the ocean or rivers, streams and lakes. They end up in landfills, which is better than in a body of water. But even in a landfill, plastic poses problems.
The big problem is plastic that isn’t headed to a managed garbage dump. Rather, it simply gets tossed aside. David Katz identified this problem seven years ago and that motivated him to start the Plastic Bank. He just reported, “Plastic Bank has now directed more than one billion plastic bottles from entering the world’s oceans. That’s 20 million kilograms of plastic.”
Katz says, “We worked with more than 17,000 individual collectors in Haiti, the Phillipine, Indonesia, Brazil and Egypt to collect plastic from vulnerable coastal communities.”
We invited David Katz of Plastic Bank to join us for a Conversation That Matters about working to ensure plastic can be recycled, can be a part of the circular economy and can continue to play a positive role in people’s lives.
