Plastic Bank Blog

It’s a wrap for this year’s K Show! While the world’s no. 1 rubber and plastic trade fair has ended, the quest for Ocean Stewardship for some attendees has just started.  For the duration of trade fair, the Plastic Bank team had meaningful conversations with individuals pained by the degradation of our ocean caused by […]

What is the Circular Economy? We’ve spent hundreds of years extracting materials to make products that end up in waste piles. This model of manufacturing is linear — you put stuff in, you get something, you use it, then throw it out. This practice is making our planet less habitable every passing minute; running it […]

Ocean plastic is one of the greatest threats to our marine ecosystem, harming more than 800 species that call it home1. Over the years, news about marine animals dying from ingesting plastic waste has become more and more common.  But isn’t it strange that animals would choose to eat plastic in the ocean over their […]

Plastic has been a priceless invention for human advancement. Yet, it also kills marine life and devastates our ocean. It’s a complex history, but let’s quickly learn when was plastic invented, where our relationship with plastic currently stands, and what we can do about it. In 1869, John Wesley Hyatt invented the first hard plastic […]

Ocean-bound plastic has undoubtedly become a buzzword in the environmental space. You might have heard of it, but many wonder the same thing – what does it really mean? Simply put, ocean-bound plastic is any discarded plastic material within 50 kilometers of our precious seas, streams, rivers, and lakes that is likely to enter the […]

Make sure your approach has positive, measurable impacts that can be brought to scale. Make sure it can reach at least a million people and make their lives measurably better. Paul Polak, social entrepreneur and author of Out of Poverty: What Works When Traditional Approaches Fail To be brought to scale, Plastic Bank had to […]

We've accomplished significant results toward our 2025 goal. For example, between January 2020 and December 2020, we prevented 510,350,100 single-use plastic bottles from entering the world's ocean - the equivalent of 10,207,002 kilograms prevented from entering the world's oceans.

These concepts play an important role in the three Abrahamic traditions – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. They also underlie the principles of Plastic Bank’s model to help stop ocean plastic while improving the lives of collector communities.

Between January 2019 and December 2019 we have collected and recycled 3,232,082 kg of ocean bound plastic - the equivalent of over 160 million single use plastic bottles prevented from entering the ocean.