(Mohamed Thasneem, Unsplash)
This article is brought to you thanks to the collaboration of The European Sting with the World Economic Forum.
Author: Emma Charlton, Senior Writer, Formative Content
- The island off Africa’s Ivory Coast floats on 700,000 plastic bottles packed into boxes.
- The resort is equipped with solar panels and has a pool.
- Entrepreneurs are finding innovative ways to control our plastic waste problem.
For many people, a glut of plastic bottles floating in a lagoon would be negative. For entrepreneur Eric Becker, it sparked an idea for a business opportunity.
Among the litter, he had a vision to build a holiday destination with swimming pools, bars and relaxation areas.
Becker initially moved to the Ivory Coast with a plan to set up a catamaran business. It took him six years to build the island resort from plastic bottles, he told Reuters. The result floats on 700,000 bottles packed into boxes in the middle of Abidjan’s lagoon, with a hotel that opened in 2018.
“Little by little, my idea of building a travel boat turned into how to build a system,” Becker says.
Would you stay on an island made from plastic waste?
Around 100 guests visit the island each week, with most coming on weekends. While the destination has solar panels for electricity, water has to be pumped in from the land because the lagoon is too polluted.
Becker’s work underscores the importance of finding innovative ways to tackle the volume of plastic in the environment. The challenges presented by single-use plastics are now well known, with roughly a truckload dumped into the ocean every minute. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation shows even regions with the highest recycling rates only manage to recycle around half their packaging.
What is the World Economic Forum doing about plastic pollution?
More than 90% of plastic is never recycled, and a whopping 8 million metric tons of plastic waste are dumped into the oceans annually. At this rate, there will be more plastic than fish in the world’s oceans by 2050.
The Global Plastic Action Partnership (GPAP) is a collaboration between businesses, international donors, national and local governments, community groups and world-class experts seeking meaningful actions to beat plastic pollution.
It aims to show how businesses, communities and governments can redesign the global “take-make-dispose” economy as a circular one in which products and materials are redesigned, recovered and reused to reduce environmental impacts.
The project showcases how plastic can repurposed and used in innovative ways.
“It is a beautiful project and I think in future there will be several floating islands like this one,” says Becker. “We could have floating islands all over Ivory Coast and that would be great for us.”
[…] 90% of plastic in never recycled, thus eight million metric tonnes of plastic wastes are discharged into the oceans in a year. Consequently, It is estimated that in 2050 there will be more plastic in […]