A NEW CURRENCY
David Katz’s social enterprise turns garbage into money
You can’t tell people to recycle when they are wondering about their next meal, and most of the plastic in the ocean comes from areas of poverty. We don’t send them out to recycle, we make it worth their time. David Katz, CEO of The Plastic Bank
David Katz’s transformational moment came while gazing at a trash heap through clear ocean waters in the Philippines and the idea he coined has taken him all the way to the Vatican and the United Nations.
In a nutshell, it’s this: A plastic bottle isn’t garbage, it’s the end of poverty.
“I was at Manila Ocean Park and I could see through the water and what struck me so profoundly was the vast debris field at the bottom,” said Katz, CEO of Vancouver-based social enterprise, The Plastic Bank.
Soon after, Katz attended an event in Silicon Valley at the bigideas think-tank Singularity University, which focuses on what it calls “exponential technologies.”
“The idea is to get together to consider and launch ideas that can affect a billion people or more, global grand challenges,” he said. “I was looking for a solution to oceanborne waste and the idea for The Plastic Bank came to me there, that we have been looking at plastic the wrong way.”
The Plastic Bank defines waste plastics not as garbage or even recyclables but as currency.
The organization is building hundreds of collection depots in places such as Haiti and the Philippines for the “ultra-poor,” where they can exchange plastics for cash, goods such as sustainable fuel, access to Wi-Fi and a whole range of services.
“You can’t tell people to recycle when they are wondering about their next meal, and most of the plastic in the ocean comes from areas of poverty,” said Katz.
“We don’t send them out to recycle, we make it worth their time.”
Among the credits people can earn are vouchers that allow their children to attend school.
“Now the plastic bottle isn’t a plastic bottle, it’s school tuition and if their kids go to school and get work, that’s social security, that’s the end of the poverty cycle,” he said. “Now they are looking at the bottle as something completely different.”
Katz aims to mobilize one billion people to collect plastic worldwide and as a currency of value, plastic will not have a chance to reach the ocean.
“The last thing the world should be thinking about is cleaning up the ocean,” said Katz. “If your sink is overflowing and the walls are getting soaked, the first thing you do is turn off the tap.”
The plastic collected is a low-cost and ethical alternative to virgin plastic, called Social Plastic. B.C.based Lush was an early adopter, using it in their packaging. Oil titan Royal Dutch Shell has collaborated with The Plastic Bank to remove one million kilograms of plastic from Haiti in 2017.
The German consumer-goods firm Henkel has committed to buying 100 million kilograms of Social Plastic a year, said Katz.
As a result, the Plastic Bank is growing at light speed.
“We are fully operational in Haiti with about 40 locations — including three new super-centres built in co-operation with Henkel — we are in the slums of Manila where we are formalizing a large informal network that was already there,” said Katz. “We will be open in Brazil this month (December) and we have just committed to Ethiopia and India.”
In November, TPB won a Lighthouse Momentum for Change Activity award from the United Nations at the UN Framework Convention of Climate Change summit. The award, presented in Bonn, Germany, recognizes “climate-change actions that are achieving real results on the ground,” according to the UN.
But that wasn’t Katz’s only stop in Europe.
As word of The Plastic Bank spread, the Vatican reached out and asked Katz to come and spend five days pitching his ideas to church leaders, including Cardinal Peter Turkson, former president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and a confidant of Pope Francis.
His visit coincided with the first World Day of the Poor and a special Sunday Mass with Pope Francis and 4,000 needy invitees.
“They are beautiful, loving people and they see this as a way to have people take action and assume stewardship over each other by serving the planet,” said Katz. “We even talked about having a plastic collection facility at the Vatican.”
Katz envisions “enlivening” parishioners to bring their plastic waste to collection points at the church’s 221,000 Catholic parishes to create a huge, low-cost stream of post-consumer plastic that would undercut the creation of new plastic on price.
“My aspiration is to interrupt virgin plastic production and we can do that by building a volume of material,” he said. “If congregations are bringing in plastic and no one has to pay them for it, that’s the lowestpriced resource on the planet.”
But, of course, he is thinking even bigger.
“There are 37 million churches all over the world,” said Katz. “We are non-denominational, so we are heading to Saudi Arabia to involve Islam, too.
“We want to do everything we can to speed up the collection of plastics,” he said. “We don’t have time to wait on this.”