Clean La Barrita protects our oceans from plastic waste

Cuyuta, Masagua, Guatemala

120,000 pounds / year

Support partner

Our story

Our Clean La Barrita Hub is supported on the ground by Tidey Ocean. Tidey's vision is to help stop ocean plastic and end poverty. They do this by collecting plastic waste from local communities and providing steady jobs and opportunities to those experiencing poverty in developing nations.

Together with CleanHub, they will be able to collect more types of plastic (film plastics) which are generally harder to recycle and have more impact on the community and environment.

The process

Order is registered

Once you (a brand) decide to support our Clean La Barrita Hub to fund the collection of plastic waste, Tidey Ocean receives the order.

Collection & Sorting

Locals can bring plastic waste to collection points in exchange for food, clean water, or money. There are between 3 and 10 full-time workers and about 100 collectors. Collectors are paid per pound of plastic collected plus they receive bonuses to help them earn stoves, fridges, tuition scholarships etc. Children can also bring plastic to school, then the school is paid for the plastic which helps fund things.

Documentation

Plastic is taken to recycling facilities in country and made into new products

100%

Recovery & Payment

All collection partners are paid based on the collected volumes. This model opens up a new revenue stream for collection businesses and sets the right incentive to collect all types of plastic

Status

6,078 kg

"Tidey aims not only to stop plastic from entering the ocean, but also to provide steady jobs and opportunities to those experiencing poverty in developing nations."

Clean La Barrita

Jeremy Porter • Founder

Maximise impact

CleanHub and Tidey are aiming to build more community initiatives like mangrove restoration, awareness activities with children and adults, value-added work like shredding that can bring better income to the people.

Empower local communities

There are a lot of rural communities living close to the coast or river. We tell everyone in the community to collect plastic even if it's not much we want everyone to be involved.

Reduce & recover

We operate a gig-economy style collection where anyone in the communities we operate in can collect plastic that we then weigh and purchase from them.

Do no harm

We're preventing plastic from being open burned or dumped along river banks, ultimately ending up in nature.

Set high standards

We do a financial planning and entrepreneurship course for our employees and collectors. We are working to help some of them start a pig farm or have chickens to subsidize their income.

FAQs

CleanHub empowers companies to take immediate responsibility for their plastic footprints. We connect ocean-loving brands with local communities, and facilitate the collection and safe processing of non-recyclable plastic. We understand the importance of proving impact, so we’ve built track & trace technology to provide evidence of how much plastic is collected, and where it ends up after we take care of it.

We choose recovery methods with the lowest environmental impact possible, and use our market position to enforce better working conditions for local workers.

80% of the plastic waste that ends up in the oceans is so-called flexible packaging or multilayer packaging, like chip packets, sauce sachets, etc. This material is either impossible to recycle or there is no demand from the market for the products (unlike water bottles which are commonly collected as they can be recycled, and so have ‘value’). Plastic that can’t be recycled is openly burned in small backyard fires or in landfills, or it is carried away into nature by the monsoon or strong winds. While we do collect all plastics, we focus on non-recyclable plastic to maximize our impact.

In order to stop ocean bound plastic, we need to significantly increase plastic recovery rates in high leakage locations. To achieve that, we empower communities around the world to cope with their own plastic waste, create incentives, develop waste management standards and foster local entrepreneurship. In our network of recovery endpoints we provide critical off-take agreements to safely treat plastic waste.

Plastic pollution is a global problem that affects us all. CleanHub is building a global network of local Collection Hubs in high impact locations to facilitate the collection and safe processing of non-recyclable plastic. We operate primarily in South (East) Asia which is the gateway for more than 80% of all plastic that enters our oceans. With your contribution we can reduce the mismanagement of plastic waste in these regions to eventually stop this environmental crisis.

Recyclable goods are sold for local recycling. Non-recyclables are sent for co-processing.

Co-processing refers to the simultaneous recycling of mineral materials and recovery of energy in the process of cement manufacturing and achieves a superior environmental performance as compared to landfill and incineration. For co-processing recovery we partner with Geocycle.

To learn more, read our blog - What happens to the collected waste

Plastic neutrality means that for every amount of plastic created, an equal amount of plastic waste is retrieved from the environment to be appropriately disposed of - either recycled or repurposed.

We work with brands to calculate their plastic footprint and recover the equivalent amount from the environment in high leakage countries, such as Indonesia or India. Some brands want to go further and recover more plastic than they emit, earning them Plastic Neutral + status. . Every contribution directly prevents plastic from entering our oceans and supports the development of local waste management infrastructure.

To stop plastic from entering the environment, we need to get to a point where the material is collected as close to the consumer as possible, and intercepted before it can reach the ocean. The majority of our plastic efforts are door-to-door collection or other smart ways to aggregate waste in one point. We also finance projects with passive technologies that catch plastic in rivers. The smallest fraction of plastic stems from beach cleanups or is directly sourced from the ocean.

Recovering plastic from the environment involves three distinct operations. Firstly the collection of the plastic, secondly the sorting of plastic into its unique types and thirdly the safe and final treatment. We digitize the recovery of ocean bound plastic from start to finish.Our Hubs use our technology to track the full collection process, which means we can verify every piece of plastic that is collected and what happens to it after we take care of it.

Watch this video to see how it works

We choose the best recovery method according to three steps. Firstly, available recovery options are ranked according to the waste management hierarchy, i.e. Recycling > Energy Recovery > Landfill. Secondly, we rank all options on the basis of life-cycle assessment results that determine related Co2 emissions. Thirdly, all recovery options are ranked by their level of technology and safety. CleanHub only works with recovery companies that operate according to the European code of conduct.