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Mea culpa from Ocean Conservancy for its influential 2015 report. Who will be next?
27 July 2022
Ocean Conservancy, an NGO in the United States that works for cleaner oceans, removed a controversial report from its site this month. The report in question was Stemming The Tide, which it had published in 2015.
Five Asian countries – China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam – were, and still are, the biggest contributors proportionately to the plastic soup. Ocean Conservancy suggested that collecting and recycling or incinerating plastic should stop plastic reaching the oceans.
The NGO now recognises that this approach was one-sided and offers its apologies. This is of great significance.
ONE-SIDED APPROACH
At the time, Ocean Conservancy’s rationale was the following. A few Asian countries contribute greatly and directly to the plastic soup in the ocean. A lot of the plastic there enters the sea from the rivers. The underlying cause is that the collection of plastic in these countries is not well organised. The collection of plastic should thus be better organised. Efforts should be made to adopt better recycling methods, and, if plastic is incinerated, the energy generated should be used for purposes such as fuelling cement kilns. The linkages between these sectors should mean that the solutions would reduce the amount of plastic reaching the ocean by 45% by 2025.
CRITICISM WAS IMMEDIATE
Environmental organisations in the region responded as though kicked in the teeth. The report entirely ignored their initiatives to put an end to plastic pollution. GAIA (Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives) in the Philippines sent an open letter to Ocean Conservancy which outlined its objections to the report. The letter was backed by more than 700 environmental organisations.
When the report was published, the Plastic Soup Foundation too was highly critical that Stemming the Tide did not even mention reducing the production and consumption of plastic once as a solution.
EMBRACED BY INDUSTRY
The contested report was co-financed by Coca-Cola, Dow Chemical and The American Chemistry Council. The writing of the report was outsourced to the consultancy firm McKinsey. It is hardly surprising that the report was immediately embraced by industry. The suggested solutions for the plastic soup hardly affected their interests at all. Quite the contrary, it was business as usual as these industries could simply continue producing and using unlimited amounts of plastic in the proposed scenario.
WASHING YOUR HANDS OF ANY RESPONSIBILITY
In 2012, Ocean Conservancy took the initiative to enter into an alliance, the Trash Free Seas Alliance®, with large industrial players. They themselves claim that this brought millions of dollars to research into improved collection and recycling. In 2015, Stemming the Tide gave industry and governments an authoritative report to justify their activities. In one example, the American Chemistry Council does just that in an article entitled To Fix Plastic Pollution, We Need to Solve the Right Problem in 2018.
APOLOGIES SEVEN YEARS LATER
What is missing in our report, says Ocean Conservancy now in a statement, is that the proposed solutions actually lead to continuing the demand for plastic. It stands in the way of the much needed change to a circular and carbon dioxide free economy. Furthermore, by concentrating on only five countries, the involvement of Western companies and governments was left out. The United States in particular is a huge producer of plastic and it also exports a lot of waste plastic to these countries.
In Turning back the tide, GAIA and Break Free From Plastic respond to the apology and state that they will enter into discussions with Ocean Conservancy.
WHO WILL BE NEXT TO OFFER APOLOGIES?
The apologies are on the same page on Ocean Conservancy’s website where the report was initially placed. However, the report is still available on McKinsey’s site, the firm that was hired to write the report. This raises burning questions. Will McKinsey now offer its apologies given that it wrote exactly what its clients wanted to hear? Will the stakeholder industries, including the financiers of the report, now take distance publicly?
One important question now is, who be next to offer their apologies?
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