At the end of May Alliance Earth board member Ana Alecia Lyman and Dung Beetle Project Director Jeffrey Barbee, alongside our partner, Juliet Lyon from the non-profit organisation ParCo Mozambique unveiled our ground-breaking project to help clean up ocean plastic in the Indian Ocean to delegates at the Growing Blue Conference in Maputo, Mozambique.
The South West Indian Ocean has as much as 11 million tons of plastic dumped into it every year, usually through coastal rivers. Along the 2400 kilometers of Mozambique’s coastline there is very little recycling and our partner, ParCo, is helping change that by cleaning up the beaches and rivers along the stunning Bazaruto archipelago. The team met with local officials and gave a presentation to some of the 1200 delegates from organizations around the world.
The project links a pilot site using our technology in the town of Vilanculos, supported by ParCo Mozambique staff who are creating a #poweredbyplastic economy that pays people to remove plastic from beaches and turns it into a rural power initiative that provides electricity and fuels from the plastic. Vilanculos is the nearest town to the Bazaruto archipelago, one of Mozambique’s most famous national parks. The park boasts amazing coral reefs, a vital pathway for migrating birds and is home to the mysterious dugong, a relative of the manatee.
By using our system to generate fuel and electricity directly from plastic, we hope to grow a recycling economy that can also use the heat and power from our machine to recycle the most hardy plastics and create economic drivers that create jobs while saving marine life and tourism from plastic pollution.
The conference theme, “Sustainable and Shared Use of the Ocean”, melded well with our initiative and we took advantage of the local and international attendance to get this project’s ball rolling.
