The Power of Responsible Consumerism

The Scale of the Problem

In the next 18 minutes over 600,000 pounds of plastic will enter our ocean. This is equivalent to 18 garbage trucks pulling up to the beach and dumping the entire load right in the water. And sadly, a garbage truck worth of plastic enters our ocean every single minute of every single day.

Plastic is poisoning our oceans, which in turn is poisoning our food chain.

But let’s face it. It’s not the plastic’s fault it enters the ocean. I mean, plastic doesn’t grow legs and magically fulfil a life-long dream to go sit on a beach or swim in the ocean. And plastic doesn’t reproduce and make little baby plastics every single year. (Laughter) Ocean plastic is not a plastic problem. It’s a human problem.

And no, you’re probably not the human dumping the plastic into the ocean. You are the one with the power to help stop it from happening. And your power goes well beyond the world of plastic.

The Power of Your Purchases

So, how do you unleash that power? By shifting your mind-set and changing the way you think about consumerism.

In our modern world we are all consumers. And it’s your voice and your vote as a 21st-century consumer that actually makes you one of the most powerful and influential people in history. And just like Ben Parker once told Spiderman: “With great power comes great responsibility.”

Every purchase you make is a vote for how a product was made and a vote for the company who made it. And you have the power to reward what you want repeated through your purchases.

Blind consumerism is when we reward without research. I’ll admit, for most of my life, I was a blind consumer, until I came to realize that blind consumerism is dangerous and unsustainable. But consumerism doesn’t have to be a dirty word. As long as we use our consumerism with purpose.

The opposite of blind consumerism is responsible consumerism. And responsible consumerism is when you take an extra five minutes to use your voice and your vote, to do a little bit of research and learn a little bit more about your options and alternatives. As responsible consumer, you expand your definition of cost and value to include the environmental and social impacts of your purchases. And simply put, as responsible consumer you consider it your responsibility to make the responsible purchase.

Consumer-Driven Change: The Plastic Bank Story

So I’ll ask, Do you recall the last time that you took an extra five minutes to make a responsible purchase? Now, if something came to mind, no matter how small that something may feel, you should be proud of that something. Because I am always amazed just how often people completely underestimate the impact that they make with just five minutes.

So, I’d like to share an example of using your voice and using your vote to create consumer-driven change.

Four years ago, I joined my business partner David Katz on a quest to proactively stop the flow of ocean plastic. (Applause) We discovered that 80% of ocean plastic starts on land in vulnerable regions that have almost no existing waste management systems.

This is Peru. Shortly after I took this picture, all the plastic you see was washed into the river as soon as it rained. This is the Philippines. And the Philippines is one of the largest sources of ocean plastic on the planet. And this is Haiti. And all around the world, environments like these are more common than most people realize.

And in these environments, people see plastic as something that has no value. They see it as waste. And it’s actually common practice to just throw plastic into the rivers, the canals, in the ocean-bound waterways. And they do it as a means of throwing it away. But when we throw something away, it has to go somewhere. And all too often, away means the ocean.

Building the Solution

But after some research, David Katz and I became confident that we could create a self-sustaining business solution to stop the root cause of ocean plastic. We could make plastic waste too valuable to ever get thrown in the ocean.

First, we need to create a rewarding incentive system that would transfer the value of the plastic into the hands of the person who is collecting it. We need to create a means that anyone can just go out, collect enough plastic that they could provide for their families and send their children to school.

Second, we need to get some of the world’s largest corporations purchasing social plastic to use in their manufacturing and supporting the expansion of these social-plastic ecosystems around the world.

And finally, to make that happen, to get their attention, we need to attract and inspire a movement of responsible consumers asking for social plastic.

The Million-Person Ask

So, we started by creating a wave of mass media. I was able to find a story teller at just about every major media outlet who’s inspired to use their power to share our mission. And after over 300 media features, we started to attract the attention of responsible consumers.

And when responsible consumers see something of interest, they take that extra five minutes to learn a little bit more, do a little research, and look for a way to make an impact.

And we made it really easy. We asked people to please like our Facebook page to prove the demand for corporations to use social plastic. We didn’t ask if they liked our company. We didn’t ask if they liked the product. We asked if they shared a passion and believed in our mission to reduce ocean plastic and poverty.

Now, you might ask yourself, So what? What difference does a single Facebook like make? I can tell you this. It starts with a like. Then it becomes multiple likes, then hundreds, then thousands. Today, we have one million people asking for corporations to use social plastic. (Applause)

Every single like was part of a million person ask, and when a million people ask for the same thing, the world’s largest companies, they start to listen.

But it didn’t end there. A lot of people took an extra step and started to ask the brands by name on Twitter to use #SocialPlastic. And as more people kept doing these tweets and asking brands to use #SocialPlastic, they started taking pictures of these tweets, and they sent them to those companies. And when they got that email, they saw the demand, they saw the tweets, and more often than not, they responded immediately, “You have my attention. Let’s chat.”

With just that five minutes of extra effort, those responsible consumers helped us open some of the biggest doors possible. We are now selling social plastic to some of the largest companies on the planet.

Technology and Blockchain

And we are even having some of the most powerful partners help us amplify this around the world. For example, IBM saw the opportunity to make a genuine impact, and they are helping us to literally turn plastic waste into a digital currency.

So, in areas that we operate, it’s such a vulnerable region and it’s dangerous for people to have cash. At the same time, people can’t qualify for bank accounts. So, we’re creating a digital exchange and a digital currency system that makes it safe for someone to transact, for someone to earn a living through recycling.

And this is using advanced technology. This is Blockchain, Hyperledger Fabric on LinuxONE, which a fancy way of saying this is an enterprise system meant to empower a billion people to gather together to monetize waste.

And soon, anyone in the world will just be able to download an app and start earning a living through recycling or even just help to prevent ocean plastic and poverty from happening.

And I’m proud to say that in the next ten years, we anticipate preventing over one billion pounds of plastic from entering the ocean. (Applause)

And all of that is possible because a large number of responsible consumers took an extra five minutes to use their voice and use their vote to ask for the change they wanted to see.

The Universal Principle

Now, I tell this story and I share these tactics because pro-activity works. And the concept of consumer driven change, it’s universal. Tools like Facebook, Twitter, petition sites like change.org, they’re empowering you to cause genuine change. And every year, we’ve seen more and more successful examples of consumer driven change. We’re seeing more ethically sourced products, more sustainably sourced products. We’re seeing more cruelty-free products. And we’re seeing more of these because more people are asking. And more people are voting with their wallets.

So, the next time you see a problem or cause you care about and you catch yourself saying, “Somebody should do something about it,” remind yourself that you are somebody.

And though the corporations have an epic power, they no longer have all the power. You do. Because corporations only produce what consumers buy repeatedly. When enough people stop buying an item, that item stops getting made. With enough people stop buying from a company, that company goes out of business. And when enough people all ask for the same thing, corporations compete to meet that demand because corporations only exist to meet the consumer demand. And therein lies the secret to using your power to create epic change.

Five Minutes to Change a Habit

And every year, it is getting easier for you to act like a responsible consumer. In our interconnected online world, we’re taking trust and transparency to entirely new levels. You can now take out your cell phone and ask it to help you search the difference between two options. And you can do it right from the grocery store. And you can even use that same cell phone to take a picture of any wrongdoing or injustice anywhere in the world as it happens. It is getting harder for corporations to hide the bad and easier for you to discover the good.

And if you think about it, if you held two products in your hand and they are the same cost and the same function, but you know with confidence one product will cause harm to the planet and the other will make a positive impact, I’m confident that you would make the responsible choice every time. Because it goes against human nature to want to do intentional harm with your purchases. Just as it goes against human nature to change your habit overnight.

But I found, change is best done incrementally. So my wife and I, we made a simple commitment. Once a week, we would sit down, do a little research and improve one purchasing habit. Every week, the same routine. And this could be simple little things like finding locally sourced food or just ensuring that everything you buy can actually be recycled in your own community. These actions might sound small, but over time, incrementally improving your habits adds up to a huge impact.

A Human Thing

And it’s this incremental approach that really gets me optimistic. Because I do not believe the world will change overnight. But I do believe it can change over time for the better. And this is what we are on the verge of seeing.

We’re approaching this new era in which the average person is actually starting to act like a responsible consumer. And the beautiful thing is we don’t need everyone to act this way for it to work. We just need to get to the average because once we get to the average, we hit a cultural tipping point where it no longer becomes a hippy thing or a millennial thing; it becomes a human thing to purchase responsibly.

And thankfully, being human is the one thing we all have in common.

And know it’s true, since I started talking, almost 18 garbage trucks worth of plastic has now entered our ocean. But I know that you have the power to stop that trend and others like it by using your voice and using your vote to ask for and create the change this planet desperately needs.

(Applause)