Seven Clean Seas, a Singapore-based social enterprise whose mission is to help companies achieve plastic neutrality with plastic credits, has employed the furloughed workers of Nikoi and Cempedak Islands in Indonesia for its beach clean-up programmes.
Tom Peacock-Nazil, CEO and co-founder, said with tourism down to zero, “we saw an opportunity to offer them employment and give them an extra bit of income at the same rate, plus a bonus day rate. So they’re actually earning more money for this one day a week than they were earning on a one day previously.”
The Nikoi and Cempedak team of about 20 are cleaning up beaches on the east coast of Bintan, which is a marine protected area. “Not only are we doing plastic recovery from the ocean but we’re doing it from a marine protected area and helping on the conservation side of things as well. The workers love it, we’ve actually got more people wanting to do it than we can afford to employ.”
Currently the funding is coming from Seven Clean Seas’ own pockets and it is seeking corporate sponsorship to fund these activities as well as employ furloughed workers from travel and hospitality. Sponsorship is priced at US$26,000 for a one-year commitment to employ teams of 20 in these clean-ups.
“We have to offer stability as well. We can’t say here’s a job for a month, and then you don’t have a job next month. We’re talking to some big businesses about funding multiple teams.”
To scale this programme, Seven Clean Seas is signing up as an associate member of The Long Run, a membership organisation of nature-based tourism businesses committed to driving sustainability around the 4Cs – Conservation, Community, Culture and Commerce.
Through this, it hopes to be able to offer clean-up programmes where Long Run members are – from Zanzibar to Mauritius – and secure corporate sponsorships to deploy their furloughed staff.
“Hundreds of people have lost their jobs. It’s devastating, to be honest, it’s really sad to see these people living in locations that are 100% tourism 100% hospitality, so what are they going to do?
“We’ve got a bit of time before we get any serious kind of corporate sponsors on board … but it would be nice to be able to scale up to 10 or 20 teams at some point and really be able to kind of compound that benefit.”
From pristine beach to plastic horror movie overnight
Peacock-Nazil and his wife Pamela started Seven Clean Seas after a trip to Koh Lipe, an island in the Andaman Sea near the Thai-Malaysian border, about two-and-a-half years ago. In a span of 12 hours, they saw a stunning beach turn into “a plastic horror movie overnight”.
“There was so much plastic that had been deposited on the beach that we could barely walk. And it was the first time we really understood the scale of the issue for a beach to go from that pristine to that messed up in a 12-hour period.”
On their return, they started organising beach clean-ups in Singapore and soon they were gathering groups of 600 people.
That grassroots interest triggered their passion and they set up Seven Clean Seas to tackle the bigger problem of plastic waste. Thus far, the organization has cleared more than 60,000 kg of plastic waste from the beaches of Singapore and Indonesia.
He knows though this is only a drop in the ocean as far as plastic waste is concerned, which is why he’s scaling Seven Clean Seas by using technology and introducing plastic credits to help companies achieve plastic neutrality. He resigned his finance job about a year ago to focus on Seven Clean Seas.
“Our goals are to be operating in the seven worst plastic polluting countries by 2025 and to recover 10 million kilos of marine debris by 2025.”
And the seven top offenders for plastic pollution are, in descending order, China, Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Malaysia.
According to him, 11 million metric tonnes of plastic enter the ocean every year. By 2040, this will go up to 29 million metric tonnes, that’s equivalent to 50kg for every metre of coastline globally – so that means every single year, every single metre of coastline would have the equivalent of 50kg of plastic.
Plastic credits, a new industry in the making
His idea is to complement community outreach clean-up crews with high impact projects using river plastic recovery technology and environmental plastic recovery.
Companies can then buy plastic credits to help fund these schemes and achieve plastic neutrality. He’s currently working on a pricing model as well as several clean-up projects with major companies, details of which he said were early to share at the moment.
Said Peacock-Nazil, “Companies have to use a certain amount of plastic but if they want to be responsible, they can commission Seven Clean Seas to recover that same quantity of plastic from the ocean. They can then be plastic neutral for that particular year.”
With more attention now being paid to plastic, he believes “it’s a new industry in the making”.
“The end goal really is plastic neutrality. We would like to see companies who have to use plastic be responsible and invest in our projects like our teams in Indonesia to recover plastic and create plastic neutrality.”
His first client since 2018 is the German condom company Einhorn, which manufactures their “vegan” condoms in Malaysia. “They are a very progressive company. They’re really leading sustainability in Berlin and Germany,” he said.
He believes sustainability is becoming mainstream in Singapore. “They want to make Singapore a regional hub for recycling and recycling technology, which is really exciting. By 2025, Singapore will have much better recycling rates because our plastic recycling rate in 2019 was four percent which is pretty embarrassing to be honest. We can do better. Singapore’s journey is underway. The rest of South-east Asia is miles behind.”
The tide is changing though, he said, with more social enterprise startups emerging to solve sustainability issues.
Seven Clean Seas is currently self-funded and Peacock-Nazil said a milestone was reached in April. “After almost two years, I was able to employ myself on a full EP (employment pass) and pay myself a salary off my passion project. It was a fantastic feeling to know you’ve built something from nothing. And you can finally employ yourself, that’s really cool.”
• All images credit: Seven Clean Seas