Solving the Ocean Plastics Problem
EHF Fellow Vanessa Coleman is on a mission to stop plastics polluting our oceans. She is the co-founder and CEO of Oceanworks, which keeps plastic out of the environment by creating new, high-value markets for our plastic trash.
With 400 million tonnes of plastic waste produced around the world each year, Vanessa and the Oceanworks team are combining technology, creativity and circular economy principles to help keep plastic out of the ocean.
Vanessa says:
“Recycling is the biggest and best alternative to plastics becoming pollution, but it still only accounts for a small percentage of the overall waste stream. The scale of the global plastics pollution problem is huge, so we need to scale our solutions to be just as big.”
Appreciation of the natural world
Vanessa’s appreciation of nature began in the wide open spaces of Colorado. Surrounded by mountains and parks, Vanessa spent her childhood hiking and camping and was encouraged by her parents, who were teachers, to explore the outdoors and learn about wildlife. During summer camps she would study birds and observe how they interacted with their ecosystems. Her family took trips to the East Coast of the US, where they would spend time sailing and waterskiing, and it was there the ocean - specifically the Atlantic Ocean - caught Vanessa’s attention. She remembers appreciating its sheer vastness - the huge expanse of water stretching from land to horizon. This appreciation of the ocean would go on to become a desire to protect it from pollution.
With a love of the natural world and science, Vanessa studied environmental science at Dartmouth college followed by environmental engineering and business at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). These subjects gave her a solid environmental grounding and the combination with business studies opened her eyes to what was possible.
“Being at MIT exposed me to entrepreneurship as a career option. Being able to connect knowledge and ideas to creating and building things that benefit the world in some way excited me. That was where I found my passion and career path.”
That was the launchpad. While studying, Vanessa co-founded Saha Global, a non-profit organisation getting clean water to people in remote areas of Ghana, and also started FINsix - a breakthrough technology company in energy efficient power electronics. These formative years helped Vanessa explore not only what was possible, but what was important - to her personally, and to the world around her.
Awakening to the plastics pollution crisis
Throughout her studies, Vanessa had had the opportunity to travel to remote areas in Northern Ghana, New Zealand and Central America - as well as densely-populated cities throughout Asia. By the 2010s as Vanessa revisited places from earlier travels, she was astonished by the proliferation of waste, specifically plastic waste, in the environment. The reality of the global waste crisis had hit her. The result of a huge surge of consumerism was everywhere, with previously pristine beaches, clean roads, and remote villages now strewn with rubbish.
Potential of Reclaimed Plastics
“Looking at that landscape, I saw harmful plastic but I also saw a potentially valuable resource wasting away. I became very interested in the idea of getting the economic incentives right to motivate recovery of this waste, cleaning-up the environment while improving lives and creating jobs within local communities.”
In 2018, Vanessa met Rob Ianelli co-founder of Norton Point, a mission-oriented brand that was the first to use ‘ocean plastic’ in eyewear. There was a clear opportunity to create demand and value for this mismanaged plastic waste stream by making it a reliable supply for large global brands; however, ensuring consistent quality and providing transparency was challenging in this informal market. Vanessa and Rob saw an opportunity to use their knowledge to make that process easier for brands. That year, Vanessa and Rob co-founded Oceanworks.
Evolution and Action
Fast-forward to 2024, and 1000s of tonnes of waste plastic later, Oceanworks has become a leading global source for Post-Consumer Recycled materials (PCRs) and plastic pollution offsets. Everything in the network is transparently tracked from shore-to-store. Vanessa notes that all Oceanworks recycled resins are high-quality, reliable, and competitive; and every oceanbound program directly reclaims plastic pollution. Oceanworks has brand partners spanning footwear, plastic films, children’s toys, pet accessories, cosmetics, apparel, kitchen items and much more.
Vanessa reflects that Oceanworks has evolved a lot since it began.
“We originally saw ourselves as a marketplace, compiling different resins from different corners of the globe, then making them available for customers to browse and select.”
Vanessa points out that product manufacturers rarely wanted a vast array of choices - they just needed one that met their requirements, and this led to Oceanworks becoming more of a specialty supplier of high-quality PCRs with an impact story.
However, as Oceanworks’ networks collected more-and-more high-value plastic waste for the production of performance resins, this created a new challenge. The low-value waste, like multilayer films, was left behind as there was no incentive to collect these materials. In response Oceanworks was one of the first to develop a plastics offset programme, called Oceanworks IMPAC+, designed to incentivise the reclamation of low-value plastic waste. Plastic credits, unlike carbon credits, fund the direct reclamation of plastic waste that would not have otherwise been recovered. She says:
“Brands are starting to see that they need to be proactive about reducing their plastic footprint like they do their carbon footprint. By taking their environmental plastic leakage seriously and quantifying and directly addressing it they show that they are committed to being part of the solution.”
Oceanworks IMPAC+ projects span the globe and target hard-to-collect and hard-to-recycle waste streams, with the ultimate goal of establishing sustainable supply chains for these materials that can ultimately survive and thrive without the credit. For example, one Oceanworks mismanaged waterways project focuses on ‘turning off the tap’ by catching and sorting plastic from canals and other waterways before it enters the ocean. Waterway plastic is the number one contributor to ocean plastics around the world, so intercepting it stops ocean pollution at the source. This waste can then be sorted, with a portion of it returning to the circular economy as building materials.
So far Oceanworks’ IMPAC+ programmes have reclaimed more than 14,000,000 pounds of plastic from the environment. Vanessa says Oceanworks IMPAC+ program continues to evolve, particularly given the regulatory environment, but it is creating new channels for hard to recycle plastics, aided by new advancements and technology.
Innovation, Awareness and the Future
Vanessa says it’s a very dynamic time in the industry, with consumers, governments and business starting to take seriously the need for more climate-friendly alternatives to fossil fuel-based plastics.
From a regulatory perspective, Vanessa points out that governments are actively looking to take action on plastic pollution. Most countries who historically accepted plastic waste from other parts of the world have put a stop to this practice. Some countries are adopting Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) schemes that make plastic producers and importers responsible for helping to finance plastic waste reclamation and recycling. Others are considering taxes on fossil fuel-based plastic or incentives for local recycling infrastructure.
“I think there is an underlying awareness that plastic use is only going to grow and waste will continue to be a significant problem unless we take different action,” says Vanessa who points out that plastics have permeated our lives and are absolutely critical across industries for everything from keeping products dry and sanitary on the shelf, lightweighting and strengthening, and making performance wear stretchy.
“The way we live has been designed around plastic material. It’s similar to the energy-climate nexus, in which so much of modern life relies on fossil fuels, so to achieve the same standard of living, a new electricity-based energy infrastructure is needed. Unfortunately sustainable plastics are 10-15 years behind sustainable energy,” says Vanessa.
Increasing the quality of recycled plastics will be an important part of the solution according to Vanessa.
“Historically, plastic recycling meant downcycling and PCR resin was only seen as a low-cost filler. There was no quality or value creation. Today, new advanced recycling technologies, such as chemical recycling, are creating value by delivering virgin-like recycled resins; but these approaches have minimal climate benefits over fossil fuel-based plastic and continue to struggle with costs.”
Oceanworks is focused on the goldilocks middle – accelerating advancements in mechanical recycling, with the goal of using this simple, low-cost process to deliver climate-friendly, virgin-like PCRs:
“The Oceanworks team has a strong background in polymer chemistry, and we believe that advanced physical recycling process are the best path toward the panacea of virgin-like PCR resins at market price. Once that is achieved, recycled plastic use will greatly accelerate, increasing the value of waste plastic and closing the loop in the plastics economy.”
Enabling closed-loop supply chains globally is where Vanessa sees Oceanworks shaking up the system.
“As we go forward, our focus is on bringing technology to this space to deliver value. This could be the novel use of plastic credits to establish a value chain for a hard-to-recycle waste stream or it could be advancements in the recycling process to turn clean, well sorted waste into a meaningfully differentiated premium PCR. At the end of the day, both will work to increase the value of the plastic waste.”
She adds:
“I love the challenge of taking that circular value creation mindset and bringing it into all the markets where we work - keeping plastic pollution out of the environment by creating products and solutions that are better than virgin plastics.”
Looking to the future, Vanessa says:
“What’s rewarding to me, is getting waste to become a valuable resource - and working directly with those communities who stand to gain the most from closing the loop while cleaning up their local environment and improving their livelihoods.”
Through her commitment and deep knowledge of markets and systems, Vanessa is leading the Oceanworks team to tackle the oceans plastic problem from the source, showing the path forward for how circular solutions can create meaningful impact for our oceans, and the communities who depend upon them.
Vanessa is part of the Fellow group Kopakopa, which had its Welcome Experience in 2018. Learn more about Vanessa via the Fellow Directory on our website.
Learn more about Oceanworks here.
Learn more about Saha Global here, including how you can support.
