Your Impact Project at a Glance
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💕 Project Saaf Samudra (साफ़ समुद्र): In Hindi, Saaf Samudra (साफ़ समुद्र) means clean sea.
Goa is home to some of India's most beautiful seas and coastlines. Its marine biodiversity includes turtles, dolphins, and endangered corals.
Over the last few decades, the pristine coastlines of Goa have been devastated by rampant plastic pollution, affecting wildlife and contaminating waterways. We aspire to return this ecosystem to its original beauty, helping it recover, rejuvenate, and thrive. This Impact Project is our effort to stop ocean-bound plastic waste from leaking into Goa's coasts and protect the Arabian Sea. It is an effort to make our aspirations a reality.
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<aside> <img src="https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/0dd1ba1f-0b35-4dd2-90b2-9974ad3c8d87/2.png" alt="https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/0dd1ba1f-0b35-4dd2-90b2-9974ad3c8d87/2.png" width="40px" /> Project Type: Recovery of low-value plastic waste
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<aside> 📍 Location: Goa, India
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<aside> <img src="https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/191b2547-f8e3-48de-8920-bb3630992b7b/1.png" alt="https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/191b2547-f8e3-48de-8920-bb3630992b7b/1.png" width="40px" /> # of Waste Workers: 25+
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https://www.google.com/maps/place/Goa,+India/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x3bbfba106336b741:0xeaf887ff62f34092?sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi_-Ib5v9HwAhUSJaYKHV7tDTgQ8gEwJ3oECEsQAQ
<aside> <img src="https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/dc9f0093-5576-4b17-ab67-db220342fcd8/Untitled_design_(11).png" alt="https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/dc9f0093-5576-4b17-ab67-db220342fcd8/Untitled_design_(11).png" width="40px" /> Without your help, this plastic waste would have ended up in oceans.
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Goa is a coastal state with long stretches of beaches opening up into the Arabian Sea. Unfortunately, this also means that most of its municipal waste is at risk of leaking into the ocean. Currently, there is very minimal waste management and households end up openly dumping their waste or setting it on fire, giving rise to several negative environmental consequences.
In Goa, plastic waste poses a significant environmental threat. 60% of total waste generated in the state is plastic waste, with significant presence of marine litter across the coast.
The types of waste that get mismanaged the most are Multi-Layer Packaging (MLP). More than 50% of the plastic waste generated in urban cities of India is multi-layered plastic (MLP) that does not get collected because the material has no commercial value and lacks collection infrastructure. This includes soft, flexible types of packaging such as candy wrappers and chips packets. The most at risk are those that have multiple layers of plastic along with a metal coating inside, since it is almost impossible to separate the materials out in order to recycle them.
Often, in urban centers, harder types of plastic like PET that are easier to recycle, have a recovery rate of over 60-70% because of its inherent economic value. However, low-value materials like MLP have a recovery rate of less than 5%, and are most likely to leak into the natural environment and pollute our waterways.
Project Saaf Samudra aims to fundamentally redefine the status quo of plastic pollution in Goa and work towards “clean seas” which is what the name means in Hindi. The collected LVP waste is brought to the project’s Material Recovery Facility where it is further sorted, and dispatched for recycling or co-processing as appropriate.
Project Saaf Samudra (साफ़ समुद्र) is a collaboration between rePurpose Global and V-Recycle, one of India's most trusted waste management innovators. The project establishes public private partnerships with Urban Local Bodies in the region and incentivizes the collection of low value plastics (LVP) by engaging with local waste collectors.
Your Plastic Credit contributions enable us to finance the recovery of ocean-bound low-value plastic MLP waste. Waste workers collect plastic waste directly from households and commercial areas to catch the plastic before it leaks out into the environment. In setting up this supply chain, we are providing an additional income stream to waste workers so that they can gain access to better education and health care.
Following the collection of MLP, waste workers segregate, clean, and transport the plastic to cement kilns for co-processing. As this type of plastic cannot be recycled, the best environmental option as prescribed by the United Nations Basel Convention is co-processing. Energy is recovered from the plastic and the remaining waste is effectively disposed of without harmful emissions. We are also able to extract some of the minerals in the plastic waste and use them in the creation of cement. Not only does this initiative dispose of unrecyclable plastic waste without sending them to landfills, but it also reduces the usage of coal in the cement manufacturing process, thereby reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Through this project rePurpose Global endeavors to protect Goa’s marine biodiversity by preventing leakage of at least 50 million lbs of low-value plastic waste into the ocean over the next 10 years. Utmost care is taken to uphold our Impact Code to ensure the socio-economic wellbeing of waste workers.
With several depressing statistics revealing the dire state of plastic waste in Goa, your support of Project Saaf Samudra provides a much-needed ray of hope in the fight against plastic pollution in the region.
For every piece of plastic that rePurpose Global gives you credit for, it is a piece of plastic that would otherwise not have been removed from our ecosystems.
A 100% of the plastic recovered on your behalf is "Ocean-Bound". What this means is that this project focuses on the collection of plastic waste in a 100km radius from the coastline (as defined in the Verra Plastic Standards) that would otherwise have not been collected and would most likely end up in oceans. Essentially, it is an intervention to divert this plastic safely away from the oceans before it ever has a chance to leak into it.
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