The following is an excerpt from a Sustain What blog post.
A few days ago, I — like many others online — was fixated by an appalling #plasticsmonster creeping through a newly opened irrigation canal in eastern Indonesia. As you almost assuredly know, the ocean plastic crisis starts on land, and Southeast Asia is a prime source.
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The video was posted on LinkedIn by Tom Jackson, a co-founder of Honest Ocean Material, a young operation with a vital mission: “to empower local communities by reversing the ocean plastic problem and retrieving the plastic from their communities.”
They’re doing this by spreading the capacity to separate and shred high-quality recycylable material and create a reliable supply chain to serve a variety of companies eager to move to a circular model for success. The focus is villages and towns across the eastern portion of Indonesia’s vast archipelago, but — to my eye, at least — this model can travel.
I tracked Jackson down to get the back story. He’s on Lombok, the island just east of Bali. We recently spoke on a pop-up Columbia Climate School Sustain What webcast:
