Keeling Curve

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Project Summary / Description:

Our journey started when we visited Asia‚ 2nd largest landfill in Mumbai. While covering our noses from the thick fumes of burning plastic waste, we noticed we were standing between literals mountains of plastic on one end and the city‚ skyline on the other. Each American generates 231 pounds of plastic waste annually: most is dumped into landfills/oceans, incinerated, or worse, shipped off to countries in the Global South with lax environmental-regulation to be dumped there. 

We simply cannot wait for consumer behaviour or packaging to change. 

Our platform enables immediate & impactful action, today. By mobilizing financing for proven waste-management solutions, we scale up infrastructure to intercept plastic waste before it becomes an environmental pollutant, simultaneously helping transition informal waste pickers into dignified livelihoods.

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Impact on Underrepresented Groups:

rePurpose tackles two of humanity‚ greatest problems in one solution, plastic pollution and extreme poverty. Through the contributions of our PlasticNeutral consumers & businesses, we empower waste management social enterprises in Asia with decades of experience in building local waste management systems. Our offsets ensure that plastic waste otherwise landfilled, openly burned, or flushed into the oceans gets put back into the loop. This means cleaner cities, less harmful toxins released in the air, and less microplastic that ends back on our plates. 

Additionally, for every dollar we galvanize, at least $0.7 gets directly pumped into the local economy in the form of ethical wages for suppliers, pickers, and recycling workers. Our funds also go into programs that formalize informal pickers through dignified wages, sanitary work conditions & socioeconomic mobility programs such as health insurance, affordable housing, and education subsidies for children. Given that 90% of informal waste pickers are women, we are conscious about ending gender-based subjugation in the waste sector and seek to empower women waste-pickers with dignified livelihoods and opportunities for upward mobility in form of training and skill development programs.

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