Ocean Recovery Group Targets 15,000 Tons Of Ocean-Bound Plastic For Recycling

Sustainability Ocean Recovery Group Targets 15,000 Tons Of Ocean-Bound Plastic For Recycling Jeff Kart Contributor Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. New! Follow this author to improve your content experience. Got it! Jun 27, 2022, 04:15pm EDT | Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin The Dominican Republic has a plastic waste problem with a wide reach; a startup called Ocean .

. . [+] Recovery Group wants to help curb it.

Ocean Recovery Group Ocean Recovery Group has been following the news when it comes to efforts to keep plastic from getting into oceans. They’ve monitored land-based and at-sea projects and associated technologies. And they want to blow that out of the water.

Their goal for 2022: keeping 15,000 tons of plastic from getting into the oceans from places like unmanaged landfills in the Dominican Republic. “We’re the new kids on the block, but we’re planning on being the largest very soon,” says Zachary Kirstein, president at Ocean Recovery Group in Deerfield Beach, Florida. And for those in the United States: This isn’t some story about far-away problems.

“We did a big cleanup in Miami Beach and found bottles from the Dominican Republic—800 miles away,” Kirstein recalls. Ocean Recovery Group (ORG) started earlier this year and in May became the first U. S.

-based ocean bound plastic recycler to receive Zero Plastic Oceans’ Ocean-Bound Plastic Certification , meaning the plastic collected and recycled is traceable and verified. MORE FOR YOU Is Carbon Capture Another Fossil Fuel Industry Con? Sustainable Fashion Wants Brands To Redefine Business Growth Trouble With Predicting Future Of Transportation Is That Today Gets In The Way But ORG has a long history, too. The group is a joint initiative between 4G Recycling , an international recycling company with 100 years of experience, and AE Global , an end-to-end packaging and commercial planning company.

The leadership includes Kirstein, his brother Brent, and major Dominican landowner and employer Andres Fanjul of Fanjul Corp. “We feel like we’re really uniquely positioned to tackle this crisis,” Zachary Kirstein says. 4G Recycling started about 11 years ago and is one of the largest privately held recyclers in America.

“We recycled almost 600,000 tons of material last year, primarily from the U. S. We do business in 48 states.

We sell materials in about 13 different countries. ” Ocean Recycling Group got started in the Dominican Republic, Zachary Kirstein says, because he’s been buying materials from local recycling plants on the island for about eight years. “To me, that was a catalyst to wanting to do more, seeing how much of a need there was on the island” for recycling and better-paying jobs.

Zachary Kirstein, president, Ocean Recovery Group ORG As a social-business enterprise, Ocean Recovery Group has committed to donating 10% of net profits back to the local community, partnering with Mission International Rescue Charities to build a baseball facility and develop sports programming. Only about 8% of materials get recycled in the Dominican Republic. Ocean Recovery Group says only a handful of more than 250 landfills are managed.

The rest are unmanned. The country relies on “pickers” to remove materials from landfills before plastics blow or flow into rivers and beaches from wind and other weather. MORE FROM FORBES The People Who Collect Most Ocean-Bound Plastic For Recycling Are Getting A Hand Up From A Group Of Companies And Brands By Jeff Kart ORG has a 26,000-square-foot recycling factory, collecting materials brought in from eight areas.

They have plans to expand into another 20,000-square-foot facility nearby for food-grade processing. So far this year, about 4,500 of the 15,000-ton goal has been met, Zachary Kirstein says. That’s 9 million pounds to date.

Bales of ocean-bound plastic bound for recycling Ocean Recovery Group Recyclables are collected by pickers and via cleanup events, then baled into cubes or ground into flakes for shipment to the United States, Europe and Latin America. ORG sells primarily to companies and brands that want to reintegrate sustainable materials into products or buy offset credit s (similar to carbon credits). “Our goal is to make the greatest impact and getting the materials before they get into the ocean is certainly preferable to having to collect them after,” the president says.

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