As the central component of Verra’s Plastic Program, the Plastic Standard is a global standard that allows for consistent accounting of various plastic collection and recycling activities. It drives investment into projects that increase the collection and/or recycling of plastic waste. The Plastic Program enables the independent auditing of projects to determine the extent to which they have reduced plastic waste. It includes a robust set of requirements that address social and environmental safeguards, and ensure rigor and transparency through stakeholder consultations and documented monitoring, among others.
Through this project, Danone-AQUA Indonesia invests in material recovery facilities (MRFs, or TPSTs in Indonesian) to divert plastic waste from landfills. Reciki is a private waste management company that works with local governments to collect municipal solid waste from local households and businesses for recycling at the MRFs. Multisector partnerships such as this one and active participation from plastic producers play a critical role for the government of Indonesia to reach its goal of reducing marine plastic waste by 70 percent by 2025.
In the Reciki Project, high-value materials are sorted, baled, and sold to large aggregators and/or directly to recyclers. The hard-to-recycle residual plastics are repurposed–they either will be transformed into construction material substitutes such as eco-planks and eco-beams or into fuels through Refuse-Derived Fuel.
The project currently includes two MRFs and will expand into additional facilities in Java and Bali over the next few years, focusing on areas where more than 80% of plastics are estimated to be mismanaged. The project is set to collect an average of 15,842 metric tons of plastic waste/year and will support community education on waste management.
