ReSea Project is a Danish company cleaning rivers and oceans in Indonesia. It is the second organization in the world to be certified to DNV GL’s Chain of Custody standard built to assure the traceability and integrity of plastic recovered from the hydrosphere.
ReSea Project is a community-driven solution to remove plastic from oceans and rivers. The certification covers their traceability system for the collection process in Indonesia. The cleanup solution is community-driven, meaning that people in local communities are employed to recover the plastic polluting oceans and rivers. This contributes to better living conditions for those removing the plastic and their families, and it helps raise awareness to stop plastic pollution at its source.
“The impact of our cleanup is solely dependent on companies funding our mission. Choosing DNV GL and completing the certification is an important milestone for our continuous operations, as it will provide the trust and certainty needed to support us, enabling us to extract plastic at a greater scale. Something that is crucial in the efforts against the ocean plastic crisis”, says Ann Sofie Gade, Head of Business Development at ReSea Project.
The amount of plastic waste flowing into the oceans is rising and only gotten worse during the pandemic with recurrent reliance and consumption of single-use plastic. Solving the ocean plastic crisis requires significant efforts and solutions to recover the huge amounts already floating out there and prevent more plastic from flowing into oceans and rivers.
“The significant ongoing cleanup around the world creates a growing market need to provide trust and transparency in claims. An independent third party like us can verify the origin and traceability of recovered plastic against established requirements in the standard. For ReSea Project, certification of its traceability system assures transparency of its entire plastic collection process,” says Antonio Astone, Global Service Manager Assurance and Supply Chain in DNV GL.
Full traceability
ReSea Project’s certification covers to the collection of plastic, i.e. removal from waters by fishermen up until the point of delivery to designated waste banks. In addition, real-time validation of the quantity of plastic collected on an ongoing basis is included. The ToolChain platform by VeChain and associated mobile App is used to collect, record and monitor data at the identified critical control points of the collection process.
”The certification verifies the plastic extraction and quantities, which helps ensure fair compensation to the local collection cleanup team, like the local fishermen involved, and provides transparency into the collection process, ” says Antonio Astone, Global service manager Assurance and Supply Chain in DNV GL.
Standard
DNV GL’s Chain of Custody standard for reclaimed plastic from the hydrosphere sets forth requirements to assure the traceability and integrity of reclaimed plastic from any body of water. The standard is modular and can be applied end-to-end, from point of extraction to new product, or to parts of the value chain.
Certification provides proof of compliance to selected module(s). It lets organizations prove the source of the material and that it has not been mixed with any other components after extraction from a specific location in an ocean, river or lake. plastic waste from rivers and oceans.