MIIS's Center for the Blue Economy presents a free lecture by Daniella Russo, Founder and CEO of Think Beyond Plastics, entitled The Role of the Emerging New Plastics Economy: Addressing the Global Ocean Plastics Crisis? on Tuesday, October 31, 6pm-7:30pm in Room 102 at the McGowan Building.

Marine plastic is an economic, environmental, human health, and aesthetic problem posing a multidimensional challenge to humanity, often compared to climate change in terms of impact, breadth, and complexity. We know that it affects our community as well, and the fragile eco-systems of the Monterey Bay Marine Sanctuary we safeguard. Current efforts to harness it through recycling are inadequate to the exponential growth in consumption: recycling (worldwide) is affected by the dropping commodities prices of fossil fuels, which rendered virgin plastic cheaper than the recycled material. Many plastic recyclers have gone out of business.

A McKinsey report released in 2016 projects more plastic than fish in the ocean by 2050. The negative externalities associated with this growth are staggering – plastic production will reach almost 20% of the global oil production; it will use 15% of the global carbon budget and will likely surpass the airline industry’s use of petroleum. To address this challenge, in the last five years there has been a growing interest in advancing innovation for commercially and economically viable alternatives to conventional plastics. At the forefront of this work is Think Beyond Plastic, with its focus on early stage innovation and commercialization; and more recently, the New Plastics Economy initiative launched at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2016, with focus on circular use of materials and “a plastics system that works.”