How We Plan to Cut Ocean Plastic Pollution by One Third by 2030

I believe a city gives a sense of belonging. And all the waterways there are in the city are part of this belonging. So it's not about only tackling one specific river, but you are looking at the problem from the city lens and you are helping out solving city problems. I think because also the scale of the problem is not only about the river itself. It's all the other elements there are in the city. So our first 20 river projects, they were really there to show to the world that we can do this, but also to teach us how to do this. And when we started with rivers five years ago, there were just so many things we didn't know. And one of the things we didn't know is how to scale effectively. When we started the project in Kingston, originally we intended to just tackle one river there, the Sandy Gully. But then we actually learned that most of the pollution was coming from many smaller streams that were spread out throughout the city. So basically by accident, we pivoted to a whole cities approach. And that taught us how much of an advantage it is to consider a whole city a project rather than doing this on an individual river basis. So we learned that we can work with the same operating partner across all these rivers. We can work with the same government across all these rivers. So what we did over the past year is analyzing many of these rivers and try to prioritize them in terms of impact and complexity. And from that, this list of 30 cities came about that we believe are the places that we now choose as our next set of projects. I think for me what the 30 cities program means, it's like we're focusing our efforts towards a selected list of locations. So that's giving direction for our team to move ahead. My team has been scouting, researching locations left and right across the globe, trying to identify these key parameters that will help us assess how much impact we can make in certain locations and how complex it's going to be at that location in order to make this impact. So we've been scouting rivers in Panama and Jakarta, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Montego Bay, Manila, Los Angeles and Mumbai. Yeah, so we are establishing a baseline for Mumbai. And what we're trying to achieve is that we understand how much plastic pollution is there currently in the river based on that we can plan our operations, plan deployment locations, but also later on validate our impact and see how impactful our deployments are. We can then measure what the impact is on the ecosystems downstream and also we can verify on a city level what the impact is of our operations. Behind the 30 cities program, there is a data product. It's where we compile all the information that we collect across these locations. Information about the river, information about plastic, information about waste management, information about operations, information about the local ecosystem. And we put them all together and we rank them. We have some defined criteria for all of these parameters and they result in a ranking. And we compile that in a list. And that's where we offer, for example, recommendations for locations where we should prioritize. One of the core goals of the 30 cities approach is that over time we learn that your coastline will never look clean unless you solve all these rivers in that city. And that's also when we do a really big manual beach cleanup. So after that we're kind of like a clean, fresh start. Because the contract is so big, right? You have these beautiful mangroves, you have palm trees, this fantastic skyline. And then you look down and you see all this crap, unfortunately. The next step really is then to look around here. You have the barrier and if you just look out into the harbor you have dirty river in, clean river out, right? But if you just look around, there's so much trash already in the harbor that slipped through these gullies over the past years and decades. And it's there. So now we have to make sure that we remove all this legacy pollution before it fragments into very harmful microplastics. Tiny little fragments that are impossible to clean and that do a lot of damage to marine life, to marine ecosystems. And so that's the next important step is to go after this legacy pollution. And the best way to do this is together with the local communities. Again, it's a very important first step. And so that's what we're doing now. And my wish is that I come back here a couple of years from now and I won't see that trash here anymore. And ideally, 10, 20 years from now, I won't see any barriers anymore because there's been systemic change upstream with the awareness creation that makes sure that there's less plastic pollution in the first place. Over the past years, we've learned a lot. We've made a lot of mistakes, but we identified our strengths. I think we do know where we can apply our strengths better. And, of course, I'm a proud mama. I cannot say that. I'm very proud to see where we were and what we achieved over the past years with this team, how our new ways of working, our new developments, our new methodologies are helping us to collect data, understand data, apply methodologies, automate workstreams and data pipelines in a scalable manner. I think that's incredible. We expect to already be able to tackle up to one-third of all the plastic that's flowing into the ocean today. And if we can solve one-third of all the plastic that flows into the ocean, I think once we've done that, the world will demand that we're also going to do the two-thirds. So tackling this one-third of emissions, tackling these 30 cities is the crucial thing for us to do to enable the success in our mission and rid the oceans of plastic.