The Coca-Cola Foundation has launched a $120,000 plastic waste management initiative in Africa.
Nigeria Startup News reported that Coca-Cola partnered with OceanHub Africa to form Call for Bold Ideas in Plastic Circularity, a cross-continent challenge for scientists, innovators, and startups to create and propose scalable solutions to reduce plastic waste.
The announcement was made in a statement from the OceanHub Africa media team.
The program is "aimed at uncovering innovative, science-driven solutions to plastic waste across the continent" by inspiring and backing innovations and business models that can be expedited to the market. The goal is to recycle at least 540 tons of plastic waste while creating more than 150 sustainable jobs across Africa.
Herland Cerveaux, the managing director of OceanHub Africa, explained that the program was designed to ensure that promising ideas are developed and can deliver much-needed environmental and economic benefits. If selected, participants could receive a share of up to $120,000 in funding to support early-stage development along with technical support, business mentorship, and market-entry network access with the assistance of corporate partners to maximize potential.
According to Nigeria Startup News, Jeff Denby, senior director of recycling value chains at The Coca-Cola Foundation, emphasized that this initiative will provide opportunities for African innovations, strengthen communities, and generate livelihoods while simultaneously tackling plastic pollution.
According to the Guardian, an entire football field of plastic waste is openly dumped or burned in sub-Saharan Africa every minute. The lack of waste management infrastructure is problematic and highly damaging to the environment, so these types of initiatives are both timely and necessary.
Coca-Cola has similar sustainable initiatives across the world, such as ocean cleanup in Malaysia, collection method improvement in Sri Lanka, waterway plastic pollution prevention in Vietnam, and renewable energy agreements in Argentina. While these are positive, beneficial programs, the soda company remains the world's leading producer of branded plastic waste and still has a long road ahead in mending its negative impact on the planet.
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