Plastic pollution is a bane to the Pacific nations. Some businesswomen and businessmen are mobilizing to try and end it through a conference named Pacific Plasticity.

The plastic products we consume in our islands are hardly recycled and end up abandoned on our beaches or buried in our valleys. And our islands are some of the most impacted by the massive global plastic pollution dropped into the oceans, that ends up washing on our shores, eaten by our fishes, and damaging our precious ecosystems. Even though Pacific Island Nations are responsible for less then 1% of it…

A lot of good people are trying to get that catastrophe into control. Activists are educating the consumers, community are setting up recycling schemes, while some governments are taking drastic action. In the Pacific, Vanuatu was the first to announce a total ban on plastic bottles, completing its very strict legislation against single use plastics. Other Pacific countries have followed suit, even though more timidly. Single use plastic bags are now to be banned from Samoa, Papua New Guinea, Niue, Malaysia, French Polynesia, and counting.

But a new class of people is now mobilizing on this issue, with very different solutions: businessmen. They are coordinating though the event Plasticity, a series of conferences launched after the Rio+20 Earth Summit of 2012. The concept is to “find practical business solutions that get plastics out of the environment and back into circulation. Plasticity – the global forum on plastic sustainability – is a one-day intensive seminar that brings together expert local and international participants to identify solutions that are directly relevant to the region.”

This conference has been organised by the Hong Kong-based Ocean Recovery Alliance in various capitals across the world. The 11th edition will take place in the Pacific, in Suva, Fiji, on the 13th of March 2019. It is both a way of communicating new solutions imagined by entrepreneurs and a networking opportunity for the businesspeople and experts wanting to bring a sustainability spirit to the plastic industry.

Some of the experts invited at previous Plasticity events come from the worst culprits in terms of single use plastic bottles, such as the Coca Cola Company or Pepsico. But if these big companies actually want to help find solutions to the problems their products cause, there might yet be some hope for our ocean.

Here is the video announcement for the Pacific Plasticity held next week in Fiji. The event costs 35 USD for Pacific islanders: