A recent list of 100 of the world’s most compassionate business leaders was topped by the usual suspects: Paul Polman, Richard Branson, Muhammad Yunus and Elon Musk. And then there’s David Katz.

Katz is an entrepreneur based in Vancouver, British Columbia, who for years ran a company he co-founded called Nero Global Tracking, which provides GPS tracking for mobile fleets of vehicles.

Last year, Katz, 46, sold the company to pursue a bold idea. “My goal is to eliminate the production of virgin plastic,” said Katz.

Thus was born The Plastic Bank, Katz’s latest project. The bank acts as a broker for recycling companies that receive discarded plastic bottles from individuals in underprivileged communities where resources are scarce and employment opportunities are few. It was this idea – to link recycling, pollution and global poverty – that got the attention of Salt magazine, which placed Katz fourth on its list of compassionate business leaders, between Yunus and Musk.
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The Plastic Bank ran a small test project in Lima, Peru, and is now rolling out a larger project in Haiti. It works in concert with Haiti’s approximately 26 Ramase Lajan collection centers (Ramase Lajan translates to “picking up money” in Haitian Creole). Independent collectors turn in the bottles to Ramase Lajan, which sends the plastic to Haiti Recycling, which crushes it into pellets. Katz sells the pellets at a small premium, calling it “social plastic”, which he describes as “plastic with a story, plastic with a sizzle”. Waste collectors can choose whether to be paid in cash, with access to Wi-Fi or access to power to charge their mobile phones.

Katz took over management of the Haiti project in March from Executives Without Borders, a nonprofit that pairs businesses with nonprofits across the globe. Yaron Kaminski, the CEO of Executives Without Borders, said the need for plastic collecting and job creation in Haiti became apparent to him after his group traveled to the country after the 2010 earthquake and observed flooding as a result of canals clogged with plastic water bottles. More than 130m plastic bottles have been recycled since then.

Several companies have expressed interest in working with The Plastic Bank. The cosmetics company Lush has funded some of the recycling centers in Haiti, and also used some of the recycled plastic for its packaging.

Seventh Generation, the environmentally-friendly cleaning product company, is testing Katz’s plastic to see if it can meet the company’s rigorous durability standards. Martin Wolf, Seventh Generation’s director of sustainability and authenticity, said the company also wants to make sure the supply produced by the Plastic Bank will be consistent and sustainable. Seventh Generation aims to have 100% of its bottles come from post-consumer plastic.

“I think [Plastic Bank] is a marvelous idea because it addresses so many issues simultaneously,” Wolf said. “One is the senseless waste of disposable plastic and another is the consequence of those plastics being unconstrained in our environment.” According to Wolf, it also addresses the need to “bring income to the ultra-poor at the base of the pyramid”.

While the initial interest in Plastic Bank appears promising, Michael Gordon, a professor of social entrepreneurship at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, says the market for premium packaging remains untested. “There’s not extraordinarily conclusive evidence that the normal buyer is willing to pay more for something that has a social premium attached to it,” Gordon said.

Katz said marketing will go a long way toward building interest in higher cost, socially and environmentally conscious packaging.

“We know there’s going to be a company that’s going to want to say they are cleaning the world of their competitor’s mess,” Katz said.

Cleveland Justis, executive director of the Child Family Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of California at Davis, said Plastic Bank’s success in Haiti doesn’t mean it can jump the project to Africa, Indonesia or the Philippines – other places Katz has mentioned – and expect it to work. “It’s very, very hard to scale social enterprises across the world,” Justis said. “In my world I get a lot of people with really passionate ideas, really great ideas, but they haven’t been tested.”

Robert Goodwin, a co-founder of Executives Without Borders and director of philanthropy at Mattel, said he thinks the key to growth is to plan entry into each new region by following his group’s model: work with nonprofits to build relationships and infrastructure, and then create “the ability for companies to take over”.

Meantime, Katz plans to expand this fall with the rollout at recycling centers of what he describes as “the world’s first open source, tabletop, 3D printing filament extruder”. The Plastic Bank designed the printer with engineers at the University of British Columbia. It can be used to create a variety of products, such as small components the bottle collectors can sell to local automotive shops.

source:- theguardian.co